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Half of the titles on the shortlist for this year’s English PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize for History examine war and its effects.
David Crane’s Empires of the Dead (William Collins) about World War One’s war graves, William Dalrymple’s account of the first Anglo-Afghan War, Return of a King (Bloomsbury), and The Long Shadow by David Reynolds (Simon & Schuster), an assessment of the First World War’s impact on Britain, are all in the running for the £2,000 annual prize.
Other titles that have made the shortlist are: The First Bohemians by Vic Gatrell (Allen Lane), a look at 18th century artists in Covent Garden; Under Another Sky (Jonathan Cape), where author Charlotte Higgins tries to discover the remains of Roman Britain; and Carl Watkins’ The Undiscovered Country (Bodley Head), a look of Britain’s history of mortuary traditions.
Chair of the 2014 judging committee, biographer and critic Anne Chisholm, who is also the Chair of the Royal Society of Literature, commented: ”Our shortlist reflects the variety of ways in which history is written today. As well as thrilling narrative, and brilliant scholarly analysis, we picked books combining biography, travel and art. Although dominated this year by studies of war, all these books are exhilarating and a pleasure to read.”
In addition to Chisholm, this year’s judging committee comprises of literary journalist Michael Prodger and historian and author Anna Whitelock.
The PEN Hessell-Tiltman 2014 Prize for History will be presented on Thursday 10th April at the PEN Literary Salon at the London Book Fair.
The prize, which was launched in 2002, is named after former PEN member Marjorie Hessell-Tiltman, who died in 1999, bequeathing £100,000 to the PEN Literary Foundation to found a new prize. It is open to non-fiction books of historical content covering periods up to and including the Second World War. Last year’s winner was Keith Lowe for Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of WWII (Viking/Penguin).