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Scotsman
06-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
Elizabeth Longford Brief Lives 2025 Essay Award offer Edinburgh young writers an opportunity to win £2000
Watch more of our videos on and on Freeview 262 or Freely 565 Visit Shots! now Celebrated authors, Antonia Fraser and Flora Fraser, and Fellow Historical Biographers and Historians Launch New Essay Award: Elizabeth Longford Brief Lives 2025 Sign up to our daily newsletter Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to Edinburgh News, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... Young writers from Edinburgh have the opportunity to win a prize of £2000 by entering a new essay competition created and judged by award-winning historical biographers and historians. Celebrated authors, Antonia Fraser and Flora Fraser, and fellow historical biographers and historians launch today (May 6th) a new literary prize worth £2000 for younger writers: the Elizabeth Longford Brief Lives 2025 Essay Award. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Entries will be appraised by the judges, all eminent historical biographers and historians, of the Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography (2003). The panel consists of Professor Roy Foster (Chair of Judges), Flora Fraser, Antonia Fraser (Elizabeth Longford's daughter), Richard Davenport-Hines, and Professor Rana Mitter. The winning essay will be considered for publication in the Times Literary Supplement. Celebrated author, Flora Fraser and Fellow Historical Biographers and Historians Launch New Essay Award: Elizabeth Longford Brief Lives 2025 The Brief Lives 2025 Essay Award is open to writers in the UK and Ireland aged 35 and younger, and essays may be submitted from now until 30 September 2025 inclusive. The word limit is 3,000 or fewer, and the biographical subject, or subjects, should be historical figures of significance. See for more details about the Award, including eligibility. Submissions for the Elizabeth Longford Brief Lives 2025 Essay Award, in pdf form, to be made to: [email protected] Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad The Essay Award winner will be announced at an Elizabeth Longford Night of History at the National Portrait Gallery on 26 January 2026. This will incorporate a panel discussion by leading practitioners of historical biography followed by a reception. The Elizabeth Longford Brief Lives 2025 Essay Award is sponsored, as is the Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography, by Peter Soros and Flora Fraser. They founded the Prize, worth £5000, in 2003 in affectionate memory of Flora's grandmother, the distinguished biographer of Queen Victoria and the Duke of Wellington. Recent winners include books by Julian Jackson on de Gaulle, Jackie Wullschläger on Monet and Ramachandra Guha's Rebels Against the Raj. Flora and Peter are now sponsoring the new Elizabeth Longford Brief Lives 2025 Essay Award. It is intended to encourage a succinct but penetrating approach to historical biography, as pioneered by John Aubrey. Submissions for the Award should also embody the qualities of scholarship and strong narrative drive which distinguish Elizabeth Longford's own work and that of former recipients of the ELHB Prize. Chair of Judges, Professor Roy Foster, says, 'The Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography has fostered a greater appreciation of historical biography as a genre and of the significant role it plays in helping us understand both the past and the present. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad 'The Elizabeth Longford Brief Lives 2025 Essay Award similarly seeks to reward younger writers who can offer new insights and bring historical figures vividly to life within a short compass.' Flora Fraser says, 'My grandmother was passionate about encouraging younger authors to write and explore the art of historical biography. We hope that this new award will motivate a new generation to research and write about the past with depth and imagination. We are very much looking forward to receiving and reading submissions.'
Scotsman
06-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
Elizabeth Longford Brief Lives 2025 Essay Award offers Scottish young writers an opportunity to win £2000
Celebrated authors, Antonia Fraser and Flora Fraser, and Fellow Historical Biographers and Historians Launch New Essay Award: Elizabeth Longford Brief Lives 2025 Sign up to our daily newsletter – Regular news stories and round-ups from around Scotland direct to your inbox Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... Young writers from Scotland have the opportunity to win a prize of £2000 by entering a new essay competition created and judged by award-winning historical biographers and historians. Celebrated authors, Antonia Fraser and Flora Fraser, and fellow historical biographers and historians launch today (May 6th) a new literary prize worth £2000 for younger writers: the Elizabeth Longford Brief Lives 2025 Essay Award. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Entries will be appraised by the judges, all eminent historical biographers and historians, of the Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography (2003). The panel consists of Professor Roy Foster (Chair of Judges), Flora Fraser, Antonia Fraser (Elizabeth Longford's daughter), Richard Davenport-Hines, and Professor Rana Mitter. The winning essay will be considered for publication in the Times Literary Supplement. Celebrated author, Flora Fraser and Fellow Historical Biographers and Historians Launch New Essay Award: Elizabeth Longford Brief Lives 2025 The Brief Lives 2025 Essay Award is open to writers in the UK and Ireland aged 35 and younger, and essays may be submitted from now until 30 September 2025 inclusive. The word limit is 3,000 or fewer, and the biographical subject, or subjects, should be historical figures of significance. See for more details about the Award, including eligibility. Submissions for the Elizabeth Longford Brief Lives 2025 Essay Award, in pdf form, to be made to: Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad The Essay Award winner will be announced at an Elizabeth Longford Night of History at the National Portrait Gallery on 26 January 2026. This will incorporate a panel discussion by leading practitioners of historical biography followed by a reception. The Elizabeth Longford Brief Lives 2025 Essay Award is sponsored, as is the Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography, by Peter Soros and Flora Fraser. They founded the Prize, worth £5000, in 2003 in affectionate memory of Flora's grandmother, the distinguished biographer of Queen Victoria and the Duke of Wellington. Recent winners include books by Julian Jackson on de Gaulle, Jackie Wullschläger on Monet and Ramachandra Guha's Rebels Against the Raj. Flora and Peter are now sponsoring the new Elizabeth Longford Brief Lives 2025 Essay Award. It is intended to encourage a succinct but penetrating approach to historical biography, as pioneered by John Aubrey. Submissions for the Award should also embody the qualities of scholarship and strong narrative drive which distinguish Elizabeth Longford's own work and that of former recipients of the ELHB Prize. Chair of Judges, Professor Roy Foster, says, 'The Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography has fostered a greater appreciation of historical biography as a genre and of the significant role it plays in helping us understand both the past and the present. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad 'The Elizabeth Longford Brief Lives 2025 Essay Award similarly seeks to reward younger writers who can offer new insights and bring historical figures vividly to life within a short compass.'
Wall Street Journal
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
‘Ellmann's Joyce' Review: On the Trail of Genius
Richard Ellmann's 'James Joyce' is widely regarded as the greatest literary biography of the 20th century, much as some see Joyce's novel 'Ulysses,' published in 1922, as its supreme work of fiction. 'James Joyce' is a wonderful achievement. In some 900 pages, including ample footnotes, it confronts the strange life of a complex man, giving pleasure on every page. Ellmann circles his subject with a light tread and humorous insight, not without occasional severity, as one might treat a misbehaving family member. Forty-one when the biography was published in 1959, he was a year older than Joyce himself when copies of 'Ulysses' arrived at the Paris bookshop Shakespeare and Co., which was also its publisher. 'Ulysses' has proved indigestible to many well-intentioned readers, and not everyone was instantly won over by Ellmann's biography. From the columns of the Times Literary Supplement to the pubs of Dublin, the American academic was criticized for lack of subtlety—bluntly, knowledge—in evoking the atmosphere of early-century Dublin, for accepting Joyce's fiction generally as a record of actual events, and for treating the character Stephen Hero as a straightforward self-portrait. The compliment paid to the book by the critic Frank Kermode, that it 'proceeds without the least fuss,' could be taken as double-edged. Now we have a biography of the biographer. Zachary Leader guides us through Ellmann's life, from his birth in 1918 into a 'comfortably upper-middle-class' Jewish family in Highland Park, Mich., to his death in Oxford 69 years later. 'Ellmann's Joyce' is also an exercise in that underexposed genre, the biography of a book. Part II provides an account of the making of 'James Joyce.' Mr. Leader, an emeritus professor of English at the University of Roehampton in London, usually writes long: He is the author of a 1,000-page biography of the novelist Kingsley Amis; more recently, he produced two hefty volumes on Saul Bellow. 'Ellmann's Joyce' is more modestly proportioned. It is, the author says, 'neither a conventional biography nor a conventional analytic study.' It sits comfortably between the two. Ellmann's parents were immigrants from Russia and Romania. Their conscientious adherence to Jewish culture and opposition to 'marrying out' caused a degree of estrangement in their American-born sons, Richard and Erwin, who were drawn to non-Jewish women. There are parallels with Joyce's feelings of constraint in post-Victorian Ireland ruled by a tyrannical clergy. In 1904, when he was 22, Joyce fled to southern Europe with his girlfriend of just a few months, Nora Barnacle ('She'll stick to him,' his father quipped). They went first to the Austrian city of Pola (now Pula, in Croatia), then Trieste, and on to Paris, where they and their children settled, insofar as they settled anywhere. (Giorgio was born in 1905, Lucia in 1907; the Joyces were not formally married until 1931.) In a neat coincidence, Ellmann, feeling hemmed in by family pressure even at the age of 31, eloped with the woman he intended to marry. Ellmann's parents grew to tolerate Mary Donahue, but not her Christian name. To them, she was always 'Joan.'
The Independent
25-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Novelist Hollinghurst ‘thrilled' to be knighted by the King
A 'thrilled' Alan Hollinghurst was knighted by the King and said 'it is lovely' that the art of novel writing is getting such attention. The 70-year-old writer, who was honoured for his services to literature, earned the Booker Prize with The Line Of Beauty in 2004, the first work of gay fiction to win the prestigious literary award. Speaking after a ceremony at Windsor Castle on Tuesday, Sir Alan said: 'I am thrilled and astonished by it really. All I have done is sit at home and write books which is the thing I enjoy doing and find most fulfilling. 'It is a very extraordinary reward for having done that. 'Without sounding pompous about it, it also makes me very pleased for writing and for the novel. 'It is lovely that this art form should get this kind of recognition. 'There are about half-a-dozen novelist knights and it is very special. To have that kind of attention paid to writing is very pleasing to me.' Sir Alan also said the honour will spur him on for the future. He said: 'I think it does. I brought out a big book about six months ago and I am not writing another at the moment – but this is tremendous encouragement to carry on.' At a time when he could be considering retirement 'this has been a great shot in the arm,' he added. Sir Alan was born in Gloucestershire and went on to study at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he later became a lecturer, before moving to London. The former Times Literary Supplement deputy editor's first novel, 1988's The Swimming-Pool Library, was a critical and awards success and dealt with being gay in intimate detail, something that was rare at the time. It would go on to win the 1989 Somerset Maugham Award and the 1991 Forster Award. He then published The Folding Star, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction, and The Spell, before writing 2004's The Line Of Beauty. His novel, set during the Margaret Thatcher years and framed by her 1983 and 1987 general election victories, was not seen as the favourite to win the Booker Prize in 2004. In 2006, Pride And Prejudice screenwriter Andrew Davies brought the novel to the small screen with a BBC adaptation starring Downton Abbey actor Dan Stevens as Nick and Blackadder star Tim McInnerny as Gerald Fedden. Sir Alan has gone on to follow up the book with The Stranger's Child, dealing with gay themes during the First World War, which made the Booker longlist; won the French literary prize Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger and was shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize. His books, The Sparsholt Affair in 2017 and Our Evenings in 2024, also deal with gay and class themes. Sir Alan was elected to the Royal Society of Literature in 1995 and was made an honorary fellow by Magdalen College in 2013.
