BRITAIN: An acclaimed biography of one of the major artists of the 20th century has won the Whitbread Book of the Year.
British writer Hilary Spurling's Matisse the Master, the second and concluding volume of her life of the French painter and sculptor, is only the fifth biography to win the £25,000 overall prize in the 20 year history of the award.
The strongest challenge to the biography, which was well reviewed on publication, came not from Ali Smith's booker shortlisted novel, The Accidental, but from the Irish-based English writer Kate Thompson, whose children's novel, The New Policeman, which, according to the judges finished a close second. Already a three-time Bisto Award winner in Ireland, where she has an established readership, she also recently won the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize.
Thompson remarked in an interview in last week's The Irish Times, my "Irish novel" - The New Policeman - which is set in Kinvara, and looks to traditional Irish music and myth with echoes of Irish writer James Stephens, is the book that has finally launched her in her own country. It is now five years since Philip Pullman became the first children's writer to win the overall prize, the Whitbread Book of the Year, with The Amber Spyglass. Thompson is original innovative and unusually unselfconscious. Yet the Matisse biography was the obvious winner.
In the course of researching the book, which is a highly readable and definitive study, Spurling (65) was allowed access to a vast private archive of documents, letters and photographs owned by the Matisse family. Henri Matisse was born in 1869 and was influenced as an artist by the impressionist, Paul Gaugin and oriental art.
As has happened many times in the past this overall Whitbread award, which has been won by Seamus Heaney and Christopher Nolan and twice by Ted Hughes has again been claimed by the best book on the night.
