The Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize

    The shortlist has been announced for the 2022 Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize. All are new to me with the exception of Katherine Rundell's book on John Donne which has been widely praised and has already won the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction, but Confessions of a Highland Art Dealer sounds fresh and fun, I think!

Tony Davidson, Confessions of a Highland Art Dealer: A Journey in Art, a Glen and Changing Times
An ambitious young art dealer stumbles across an abandoned kirk in rural Inverness-shire and determines to transform it into an art gallery. This he does, on a shoestring, and then he sets out across Scotland to track down those with the most talent to exhibit. In fresh, surreal prose he conjures an almost lost world of eccentrics and artistic endeavour, adapting with ingenuity to new times.

Charles Elton, Cimino: The Deer Hunter, Heaven’s Gate, and the Price of a Vision 
In this gripping first biography of Michael Cimino, Charles Elton offers a revisionist history of the director famed for putting the legendary Hollywood United Artists studio out of business with the epic failure of Heaven’s Gate, after his triumphant success with The Deer Hunter. This is a story of the making of art, the business of Hollywood, and the costs of ambition, both financial and personal.

Matt Rowland Hill, Original Sins: A Memoir
This propulsive memoir of addiction and recovery breaks all the moulds of confessional writing with its sheer astringency. Its brutal retelling of a blood-and-thunder childhood in an evangelical household and a subsequent decade lost to alcohol and Class A drugs offsets the horror with a wild, brilliant humour that leaves us longing for more.

Katherine Rundell, Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne 
John Donne was the great poet of desire, death and God, and Katherine Rundell’s muscular, red-blooded life is a passionate book about a passionate man. His life was indeed a series of transformations: rake, lawyer, lover, jailbird, husband, failed diplomat, Dean of St Paul’s. Rundell’s bracing plunge into Donne’s world and the riches of his language is unforgettable.

Harry Sidebottom, The Mad Emperor: Heliogabalus and the Decadence of Rome 
In AD 218 a 14-year-old Syrian boy was proclaimed Emperor of Rome after victory in battle; for the next four years he was to prove himself the worst emperor of all. Heliogabalus threw all conventions to the winds, humiliating the Senators, flirting with the lower orders and marrying a vestal virgin – twice. History has never been more entertaining than in this lively, witty account of his life and times.

Osman Yousefzada, The Go-Between: A Portrait of Growing Up Between Different Worlds 
A coming-of-age story set in Birmingham in the ’80s and ’90s, The Go-Between opens a window on a devout, patriarchal Pakistani community in the middle of the city’s red-light district. By turns humorous, melancholy and harrowing, this account of competing models of masculinity, female erasure and friendship takes us from Birmingham to Pakistan and back to the London of Osman’s teenage years.

    The winner will be announced on 14th. March.

Comments

[Mystica]

What a range. Thanks for the post.

[Cornflower]

You're welcome!

[Claire (The Captive Reader)]

I love seeing what makes the shortlist every year- there are always titles that are new to me. I've read Super-Infinite (and feel like I'm the only person who did not love it) and look forward to tracking down a few of the others.

[Cornflower]

That's interesting, Claire. I was keen to read Super-Infinite and watched an online interview with Katherine Rundell around the time of publication and then curiously felt I'd gleaned enough from that to make reading it unnecessary! Wrong, I'm sure, as the interview was naturally broad-brush and the book will be much more detailed and nuanced, but still ...