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Rundell, Elton and more shortlisted for the Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize
Books by Katherine Rundell, Charles Elton, Tony Davidson, Matt Rowland Hill, Harry Sidebottom and Osman Yousefzada have been shortlisted for the Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize.
Rundell is shortlisted for Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne (Faber & Faber), which won the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-fiction 2022, while Elton’s “gripping” Cimino: The Deerhunter, Heaven’s Gate and the Price of a Vision, which tells the story of Hollywood film director Michael Cimino, is also up for the £2,500 prize.
Tony Davidson’s Confessions of a Highland Art Dealer: A Journey in Art, a Glen and Changing Times (Woodwose Books); Matt Rowland Hill’s “propulsive” memoir about addiction and recovery, Original Sins: A Memoir (Chatto & Windus); Harry Sidebottom’s “lively, witty” The Mad Emperor: Heliogabalus and the Decadence of Rome (Oneworld Publications) and Osman Yousefzada “humorous, melancholy and harrowing” The Go-Between: A Portrait of Growing Up Between Different Worlds (Canongate Books) are also up for the prize.
This is the ninth year of the literary quarterly and independent publisher Slightly Foxed’s sponsorship of the prize, run with The Biographers’ Club. Previous winners include Lea Ypi for Free (Allen Lane); Heather Clark for Red Comet (Vintage) and Jonathan Phillips for The Life and Legend of the Sultan Saladin (Bodley Head).
The prize will be awarded on Tuesday 14th March 2023 with a drinks reception at Maggs Bros., Bedford Square, London.
The judges are Alan Samson, former chairman and non-fiction publisher of Weidenfeld & Nicolson and the publisher of numerous biographies and memoirs; Lucy Scholes, senior editor at McNally Editions and author of “Re-Covered”, a column for the Paris Review about forgotten books and their authors; and Anne Sebba, the prize-winning author of 11 books, mostly biographies of iconic women including Mother Teresa, Laura Ashley, Wallis Simpson, Jennie Churchill and Ethel Rosenberg.
