Lucy Hughes-Hallett

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Lucy Angela Hughes-Hallett (born 7 December 1951) [1] is a British cultural historian, biographer [2] and novelist. In November 2013, she won the Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction for her biography of the Italian writer Gabriele D'Annunzio, The Pike. [3] The book also won the 2013 Costa Book Award (Biography) [4] [5] and the Duff Cooper Prize. [6]

Contents

Biography

Lucy Hughes-Hallett has written three works of nonfiction: Cleopatra, Heroes and The Pike: Gabriele d'Annunzio. She has also written a novel, Peculiar Ground, set partly in the 1660s and partly during the Cold War. In her collection of short stories, Fabulous, she reimagines stories from classical mythology, the Bible, and folklore, setting them in modern Britain.

Hughes-Hallett was a Vogue Talent Contest prizewinner in 1973 and subsequently worked for five years as a feature writer on the magazine. In 1978 she won the Catherine Pakenham Award for Young Female Journalists for a profile of Roald Dahl. Since then she has written on books and arts for all of the British broadsheet newspapers including The Sunday Times and The Guardian . She was television critic of the London Evening Standard for five years.

She has judged the WH Smith Award, The Duff Cooper Prize, The Encore Award, the RSL Jerwood Award, the Rathbones Prize, and the Hawthornden Prize.

In 2021 she was the Chair of the Judges of the International Booker Prize.

She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an Honorary Fellow of the Historical Association. [7]

In 1984, she married publisher Dan Franklin. They have two daughters.

Selected publications

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This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 2013.

<i>The Pike: Gabriele DAnnunzio, Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War</i>

The Pike: Gabriele d'Annunzio, Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War is a book by the writer Lucy Hughes-Hallett first published in London by Fourth Estate in 2013. The American edition, published by Knopf in 2013, is titled Gabriele d'Annunzio: Poet, Seducer, and Preacher of War. The book is a biography of Gabriele d'Annunzio, although it is written in a style more commonly seen in fiction, which echoes that of d'Annunzio's autobiography.

<i>The Return</i> (memoir) 2016 memoir by Hisham Matar

The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between is a memoir by Hisham Matar that was first published in June 2016. The memoir centers on Matar's return to his native Libya in 2012 to search for the truth behind the 1990 disappearance of his father, a prominent political dissident of the Gaddafi regime. It won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography, the inaugural 2017 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and the 2017 Folio Prize, becoming the first nonfiction book to do so.

Aida Edemariam is an Ethiopian-Canadian journalist based in the UK, who has worked in New York, Toronto and London. She was formerly deputy review and books editor of the Canadian National Post, and is now a senior feature writer and editor at The Guardian in the UK. She lives in Oxford. Her memoir about her Ethiopian grandmother, The Wife's Tale: A Personal History, won the Ondaatje Prize in 2019.

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La Disperata

La Disperata was the name given to the group of bodyguards who protected Gabriele D'Annunzio. It was taken up in turn by a number of later squadre and fascist military units in Italy between 1921 and 1945.

References

  1. "Lucy Hughes-Hallett". Debrett's . Retrieved 5 November 2013.
  2. Sheri Berman (30 August 2013). "'Gabriele d'Annunzio' by Lucy Hughes-Hallett". The New York Times. Retrieved 5 November 2013.
  3. Mark Brown (4 November 2013). "Biography of Italian fascist wins Samuel Johnson prize for non-fiction". The Guardian. Retrieved 5 November 2013.
  4. "Former winners recapture Costa prize". BBC News. 6 January 2014. Retrieved 6 January 2014.
  5. Mark Brown (26 November 2013). "Costa book awards 2013: late author on all-female fiction shortlist". The Guardian . Retrieved 27 November 2013.
  6. "Home". lucyhugheshallett.com.
  7. "Current RSL Fellows". Royal Society of Literature. Archived from the original on 2 October 2012. Retrieved 5 November 2013.
  8. Bianchi, R. S. (1991). "(Review of) Cleopatra. Histories, Dreams and Distortions". Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt. 28: 239–240. doi:10.2307/40000593. JSTOR   40000593.
  9. Oliver, Taplin (3 December 2004). "History & Biography - Heroes: Saviours, Traitors and Supermen - Lucy Hughes-Hallett". Times Literary Supplement. p. 27.