Duff Cooper Prize
The Duff Cooper Prize is a literary prize awarded annually for the best work of history, biography, political science or (very occasionally) poetry, published in English or French. The prize was established in honour of Duff Cooper, a British diplomat, Cabinet member and acclaimed author. The prize was first awarded in 1956 to Alan Moorehead for his Gallipoli. At present, the winner receives a first edition copy of Duff Cooper's autobiography Old Men Forget and a cheque for £5,000.
An overview
After Duff Cooper's death in 1954, a group of his friends decided to establish a trust to endow a literary prize in his memory. The trust appoints five judges. Two of them are ex officio: the Warden of New College, Oxford, and a member of Duff Cooper's family (initially, Duff Cooper's son, John Julius Norwich for the first thirty-six years, and then John Julius' daughter, Artemis Cooper). The other three judges appointed by the trust serve for five years and they appoint their own successors. The first three judges were Maurice Bowra, Cyril Connolly and Raymond Mortimer. At present, the three appointed judges are writer and biographer Patrick Marnham, film critic John McBratney, and former TLS editor Lindsay Duguid.[1]
From 2013, the prize has been known as The Pol Roger Duff Cooper Prize, following a sponsorship by Pol Roger.[2]
Winners
Source: Duff Cooper Prize
- 1956 – Alan Moorehead, Gallipoli
- 1957 – Lawrence Durrell, Bitter Lemons
- 1958 – John Betjeman, Collected Poems
- 1959 – Patrick Leigh Fermor, Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese
- 1960 – Andrew Young, Collected Poems
- 1961 – Jocelyn Baines, Joseph Conrad
- 1962 – Michael Howard, The Franco-Prussian War
- 1963 – Aileen Ward, John Keats
- 1964 – Ivan Morris, The World of the Shining Prince
- 1965 – George Painter, Marcel Proust
- 1966 – Nirad C. Chaudhuri, The Continent of Circe
- 1967 – J. A. Baker, The Peregrine
- 1968 – Roy Fuller, New Poems
- 1969 – John Gross, The Man of Letters
- 1970 – Enid McLeod, Charles of Orleans: Prince & Poet
- 1971 – Geoffrey Grigson, Discoveries of Bones and Stones
- 1972 – Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf
- 1973 – Robin Lane Fox, Alexander the Great
- 1974 – Jon Stallworthy, Wilfred Owen
- 1975 – Seamus Heaney, North
- 1976 – Denis Mack Smith, Mussolini's Roman Empire
- 1977 – E. R. Dodds, Missing Persons
- 1978 – Mark Girouard, Life in the English Country House
- 1979 – Geoffrey Hill, Tenebrae
- 1980 – Robert Bernard Martin, Tennyson, The Unquiet Heart
- 1981 – Victoria Glendinning, Edith Sitwell: A Unicorn Among the Lions
- 1982 – Richard Ellmann, James Joyce
- 1983 – Peter Porter, Collected Poems
- 1984 – Hilary Spurling, Ivy When Young: The Early Life of Ivy Compton-Burnett 1884 – 1919
- 1985 – Ann Thwaite, Edmund Gosse: A Literary Landscape, 1849–1928
- 1986 – Alan Crawford, C. R. Ashbee: Architect, Designer, and Romantic Socialist
- 1987 – Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore
- 1988 – Humphrey Carpenter, A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound
- 1989 – Ian Gibson, Federico Garcia Lorca
- 1990 – Hugh Cecil and Mirabel Cecil, Clever Hearts: Desmond and Molly Maccarthy: A Biography
- 1991 – Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius
- 1992 – Peter Hennessy, Never Again: Britain, 1945–1951
- 1993 – John Keegan, A History of Warfare
- 1994 – David Gilmour, Curzon: Imperial Statesman
- 1995 – Gitta Sereny, Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth
- 1996 – Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer: A Life
- 1997 – James Buchan, Frozen Desire: An Inquiry into the Meaning of Money
- 1998 – Richard Holmes, Coleridge: Darker Reflections
- 1999 – Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost
- 2000 – Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes
- 2001 – Margaret MacMillan, Peacemakers: The Paris Peace Conference of 1919 and Its Attempt to End War
- 2002 – Jane Ridley, The Architect and his Wife
- 2003 – Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History
- 2004 – Mark Mazower, Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews, 1430–1950
- 2005 – Maya Jasanoff, Edge of Empire: Conquest and Collecting on the Eastern Frontiers of the British Empire
- 2006 – William Dalrymple, The Last Mughal, The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi 1857
- 2007 – Graham Robb, The Discovery of France
- 2008 – Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
- 2009 – Robert Service, Trotsky: A Biography
- 2010 – Sarah Bakewell, How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at An Answer
- 2011 – Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist
- 2012 – Sue Prideaux, Strindberg – A Life
- 2013 – Lucy Hughes-Hallett, The Pike: Gabriele D’Annunzio
- 2014 – Patrick McGuinness, Other People's Countries: A Journey into Memory
- 2015 – Ian Bostridge, Schubert's Winter Journey: Anatomy of an Obsession
