Tony Lothian Prize goes to Catherine Haig for ‘engaging’ biography proposal 

The £2,000 Tony Lothian Prize for a proposal for a first-time biography has gone to Catherine Haig for An Unfinished Life – Lady Gwendolen Cecil (1860-1945).

Haig received the prize at the Biographers’ Club Christmas party, held at Albany, London. Her proposed biography tells the story of the second and “cleverest” daughter of Lord Salisbury, who served as Britain’s Prime Minister three times, and who took on the daunting task of writing his biography,

“On his death in 1903, she was the one to take on the writing of his life, despite her minimal education and unpreparedness. Four decades, four volumes and 4,000 words later, the result was a magisterial biography, its final volume still unfinished at the time of her death,” the synopsis continues.

“This despite the almost constant demands of her wider family, and the challenges of research and writing to one wholly untrained for such an ambitious project. She was eccentric, compassionate, astute, opinionated, funny and delightful, brought up happily at Hatfield House amid a wide circle of the most eminent men of the day, but she and her sister Maud were destined for a very different future from her well-educated brothers.”

The judging panel – comprising Lindsay Duguid, former fiction editor at the TLS and a judge of the Duff Cooper Prize; Dan Franklin, former publisher at Jonathan Cape; and Catharine Morris, who works at the TLS in the fields of biography, memoir, travel, bibliography and language – said the proposal “teases what it took to write such an impressive biography in those circumstances and how Gwendoline’s life, character and opinions shaped the work she produced”.

Judge Catharine Morris said: “Meticulously prepared and engagingly written, Catherine Haig’s book not only shows us the woman behind a classic of political biography, it also brings us into her warm and endearing – perhaps inimitable –  company.”

Also shortlisted were Annette Rubery, for The Female Rake – Peg Woffington’s Scandalous Life on the Georgian Stage; and Tara McEvoy, for Padraic Fiacc: Poet of the Pagan City. The prize is sponsored by Elizabeth, Duchess of Buccleuch, in memory of her mother.