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The first volume of Charles Moore's Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography (Allen Lane) has been awarded this year's £5,000 Biographers' Club HW Fisher Best First Biography Prize.
Writer D J Taylor, announcing the winner on behalf of the judges, at a ceremony at London's Savile Club last night (20th November) called Moore's biography a "magisterial . . . study of the triumph of will".
Runner-up was Harriet Tuckey for Everest: The First Ascent (Ebury), with Alan Johnson's This Boy (Bantam Press) receiving a special commendation.
The £2,000 Tony Lothian Prize for the best proposal by an uncommissioned, first-time biographer went to Elaine Thornton for her proposal for the life story of Amalia Beer. Runner-up was Eleanor Fitzsimmons for A Want of Honour: The Tragic Life and Death of Harriet Shelley.
Lady Antonia Fraser accepted her award for Lifetime Services to Biography, saying she was "particularly honoured and moved" by the accolade. "Thomas Carlyle said a well-written life is as rare as a well-spent one," she noted. "It is possible to have a well-spent life trying to achieve a well-written one."
Weidenfeld & Nicolson publisher Alan Samson confirmed that Fraser's next book will be childhood memoir My History; The Early Years of Antonia Fraser, with a likely publication date of 2015.