Monet biography by Wullschläger takes Elizabeth Longford Prize for 2024

The Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography 2024 has been awarded to Jackie Wullschläger for her biography of the French impressionist painter Claude Monet.

At an event at the London home of Flora Fraser, chair of the prize and founding judge, Wullschläger’s “historically insightful, psychologically perceptive and consummately readable” book, Monet: The Restless Vision (Allen Lane) was announced as the winner.

The award organisers told The Bookseller the Elizabeth Longford Prize is planning to launch a Brief Lives Essay Award for younger writers in the UK and Ireland. The new award for younger writers will be judged by the Elizabeth Longford Prize panel, with further details to be announced next year.

The Elizabeth Longford Prize Historical Biography prize is now in its 21st year and each year the winner receives a bound copy of Elizabeth Longford’s memoir, The Pebbled Shore, and a cheque for £5,000. It was founded after the historical biographer Longford died, aged 96, in October 2003, by her granddaughter Flora Fraser and her husband Peter Soros.

Wullschläger is chief art critic of the Financial Times whose books include Chagall: Love and Exile (2008), which won the Spear’s Biography of the Year Award and was shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Duff Cooper Prize.