Tony Lothian Prize 2019 shortlist revealed

The six-strong shortlist for this year’s Tony Lothian Prize, which awards £2,000 to the best unpublished biography, have been announced.

Run by the Biographers' Club, recent winners of the prize have included John Woolf’s Queen Victoria’s Freaks, later signed by Michael O’Mara Books, Sarah Watling’s Noble Savages, which went on to be published by Jonathan Cape, and Francesca Wade’s Square Haunting, later released by Faber.

This year’s shortlist features Emma Bielecki’s The Lives of Vidocq - From King of Thieves to Prince of Policemen, J S Casey’s Isabel Rawsthorne – An Artist in Paris and Soho, Tom Seymour Evans' The Canyons – Six British Exiles, Los Angeles and the Counterculture, Jay Prosser’s Empire’s Loving Strangers, Joe Stadolnik’s The Unsettled Life of Duarte Brandao and Lois K Yorke’s The Life and Times of a Difficult Woman: Anna Harriette Leonowens (1831–1915).

Winners of the 2019 prize, judged by Guardian critic Alex Clark, ex-TLS editor Lindsay Duguid and TLS journalist Catharine Morris, will be announced at the Biographers’ Club Christmas party on 4th December. 

Last year’s award was won by Harriet Baker for Rural Hours: Interwar Female Writers, Landscape and Living.