Вручение 1984 г.

Премия вручалась за 1983 год.

Страна: Великобритания Место проведения: город Лондон Дата проведения: 1984 г.

Роман

Лауреат
William Trevor 3.8
Penguin Classics is proud to welcome William Trevor—”Ireland’s answer to Chekhov” (The Boston Globe) and “one of the best writers of our era” (The Washington Post)—to our distinguished list of literary masters. In this award-winning novel, an informer’s body is found on the estate of a wealthy Irish family shortly after the First World War, and an appalling cycle of revenge is set in motion. Led by a zealous sergeant, the Black and Tans set fire to the family home, and only young Willie and his mother escape alive. Fatherless, Willie grows into manhood while his alcoholic mother’s bitter resentment festers. And though he finds love, Willie is unable to leave the terrible injuries of the past behind.

• First time in Penguin Classics
• Winner of the Whitbread Novel of the Year Award

Лучший первый роман

Лауреат
John Fuller 0.0
John Fuller's first novel opens with the arrival of church agent Vane on a remote Welsh island where he is to investigate the disappearance of pilgrims visiting its sacred well. While Vane looks for clues and corpses the local Abbot seaches for the location of the soul. Magical and poetic, Flying to Nowhere awakens our secret hopes and fears and our need to believe in miracles.

Детская книга

Лауреат
Роальд Даль 4.1
Эта занимательная история о том, как научиться распознавать ведьму среди людей. Ведь ты можешь сидеть рядом с ней, не подозревая, что это - настоящая ведьма! Ведьмы так похожи на обыкновенных женщин! Но они чрезвычайно опасны для детей.
К счастью, в этой книжке у мальчика была умная и наблюдательная бабушка, которая знала кое-что о ведьминских повадках. Но даже несмотря на ее наблюдательность, ведьмы сумели ей здорово насолить!

Биография

Лауреат
Виктория Глендиннинг 0.0
The Hon Victoria Mary Sackville-West, Lady Nicolson, CH (9 March 1892 – 2 June 1962), best known as Vita Sackville-West, was an English author, poet and gardener. She won the Hawthornden Prize in 1927 and 1933. She was known for her exuberant aristocratic life, her passionate affair with the novelist Virginia Woolf, and Sissinghurst Castle Garden, which she and her husband, Sir Harold Nicolson, created at their estate. This is her biography.
Лауреат
Кеннет Роуз 4.3
A brilliant, immensely readable biography of King George V of England. A work of great insight and thoroughness that has been hailed by The Times of London as "one of the most fair-minded biographies and one of the most enthralling of out time....historical biography as it should be written."

George V was born while his grandmother Queen Victoria still reigned, and as the second son of Edward VII, he had no immediate prospects of reaching the throne, and no expectations that those prospects would ever change. Acquiring only the limited education of a nineteenth-century naval officer, he grew up indifferent to science and politics, history and the arts, his views staunchly conservative, and his favorite--and principal--occupations partridge shooting and stamp collecting. But at the age of twenty-six, with the death of his older brother, he found himself in direct line of succession to the throne--a role for which he felt "ill-equipped both by temperament and training." Nor was he able to hide the feelings of inadequacy from the populace: public ceremony visibly affected his nerves, and it was widely rumored that participation in social occasions adversely affected his digestion. When he was crowned in 1910 at the age of forty-five, he evoked little affection or enthusiasm in his people, and England's leaders found little in him to inspire their confidence. Yet by the time he died in 1936, he had become one of the most popular and generally loved of British sovereigns.

George V's life spanned seventy years, during which Britain underwent enormous change, and his reign encompassed a time of unparalleled political unrest. He saw England survive one world war and watched the approach of another. He saw the downfall of the empires of Russia (during which he made the controversial decision to deny his cousin the Tsar political asylum in Britain), Germany, and Austria-Hungary; and he was embroiled in struggles--for Irish Home Rule and for Indian self-government--that presaged the dissolution of the British Empire itself. He presided over the decline of the House of Lords and the rise of the Labour Party. He involved himself in the bitter dispute that culminated in the General Strike of 1926, and he was instrumental in the formation of the National Government in 1931. Yet, during his 25-year reign, much to the surprise of his countrymen, he brought to each problem that confronted him inspired common sense and kindliness, principled wisdom, and sensibility. Considered, at first, dull and commonplace, George V quickly gained the respect of his government and the devoted loyalty of his people.

Just as this excellent biography examines in detail and sheds new light on George's years as King, so it also illuminates the years before his ascension: his childhood, his service in the Royal Navy, the effects on him and his family of the death of his older brother Prince "Eddy," and his betrothal and marriage to Princess Mary of Teck, who had originally been engaged to marry Eddy. We see George during the years of his father's reign, when he undertook--always with appropriate decorum, but often unhappily--the rigorous duties expected of him as Prince of Wales. We see, too, King George's idyllic private life: his relationship with his children (the was the typical "Victorian Papa"), with his grandchildren, and especially with Queen Mary, whose unflagging devotion to him masked her great personal sacrifices.

Kenneth Rose combines a biographer's absolute candor and objectivity with a deep respect for his subject to give us the most convincing, insightful, and vivid portrait we have had of this complex and often maligned ruler. Culling the details of George's life and reign from a variety of sources (including previously unpublished extracts of his diaries and the recollections of members of the Royal Family), Rose goes far beyond the scope of previous biographers in his revelation of George V both as a man and as a king. A superbly conceived and written biography, and a work of major historical importance.