The winners of the sixth annual Spear’s Book Awards were announced today (29 September 2014).
Winners included Ben Macintyre’s perceptive, shocking biography of Kim Philby, A Spy Among Friends; Jonathan Meades’ memoir of his time growing up in the West of England, An Encyclopaedia of Myself; and Brad Stone’s investigation into Amazon and its founder Jeff Bezos, The Everything Store.
BUSINESS
Michael Lewis Flash Boys: Cracking the Money Code (Allen Lane)
Iain Martin Making It Happen, Fred Goodwin, RBS and the Men Who Blew Up the British Economy (Simon & Schuster)
Thomas Piketty Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Harvard University Press)
Brad Stone The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon (Bantam Press) – winner
BIOGRAPHY
Charles Beauclerk Piano Man: A Life of John Ogdon (Simon & Schuster)
Ben Macintyre A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal (Bloomsbury) – winner
Nicholas Shakespeare Priscilla: The Hidden Life of an Englishwoman in Wartime France (Harvill Secker)
Philip Short Mitterrand: A Study in Ambiguity (Bodley Head)
FINANCIAL HISTORY
Angus Deaton The Great Escape: Health, Wealth and the Origins of Inequality (Princeton University Press)
Kwasi Kwarteng War and Gold: A Five-Hundred-Year History of Empires, Adventures and Debt (Bloomsbury)
Richard Roberts Saving the City: The Great Financial Crisis of 1914 (Oxford University Press) – winner
Frederick Taylor The Downfall of Money: Germany’s Hyperinflation and the Destruction of the Middle Class (Bloomsbury)
FAMILY HISTORY
Bill Dedman and Paul Clark Newell Jr Empty Mansions: The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune (Atlantic Books)
Helen Rappaport Four Sisters: The Lost Lives of the Romanov Grand Duchesses (Macmillan) – winner
Claudia Renton Those Wild Wyndhams: Three Sisters at the Heart of Power (William Collins)
Robert Sackville-West The Disinherited: A Story of Family, Love and Betrayal (Bloomsbury)
SOCIAL HISTORY
Juliet Barnes The Ghosts of Happy Valley: Searching for the Lost World of Africa’s Infamous Aristocrats (Aurum Press)
Vic Gatrell The First Bohemians: Life and Art in London’s Golden Age (Allen Lane)
Claire Langhamer The English in Love: The Intimate History of an Emotional Revolution (Oxford University Press)
Jerry White Zeppelin Nights: London in the First World War (Bodley Head) – winner
MEMOIR
Anjelica Huston A Story Lately Told: Coming of Age in Ireland, London and New York (Simon & Schuster)
Jonathan Meades Encyclopaedia of Myself (Fourth Estate) – winner
Anthony Russell Outrageous Fortune: Growing Up at Leeds Castle (Robson Press)
Gary Shteyngart Little Failure: A Memoir (Hamish Hamilton)
LARGE-FORMAT ILLUSTRATED BOOK
Clive Aslet An Exuberant Catalogue of Dreams: The Americans Who Revived the Country House in Britain (Aurum Press) – winner
Desmond Shawe-Taylor (ed) The First Georgians: Art & Monarchy 1714-1760 (Royal Collection Trust)
Edmund de Waal and Emma Crichton-Miller Edmund de Waal (Phaidon)
David Yarrow Encounter (Clearview)
These special awards will be announced on the day, in association with Laurent-Perrier:
HERITAGE BOOK OF THE YEAR
Simon Thurley The Building of England
OUTSTANDINGLY PRODUCED BOOK
David Yarrow Encounter
BEST FIRST BOOK
Rachel Kelly Black Rainbow
LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT
Craig Brown
You can buy all these books from Amazon or good independent bookstores
All books must have been first published or made available to Spear’s in English between 1 May 2013 and 30 April 2014.
Previous winners include: BIOGRAPHY: Charles Moore Margaret Thatcher: Not For Turning (Allen Lane) (pictured above); FINANCIAL HISTORY: Liaquat Ahamed Lords of Finance (William Heinemann); BUSINESS: Andrew Ross Sorkin Too Big to Fail (Allen Lane); BUSINESS: Gillian Tett Fool’s Gold (Little, Brown); LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT: David Kynaston; LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT: Tom Bower.
Previous guests have included: Justin Cartwright; Charles Moore; Tom Bower; Vince Cable MP; Nicky Haslam; Frances Osborne; Liaquat Ahamed; Anne McElvoy; Anthony Haden- Guest; Phillip Blond; Toby Young; and many of the nominated authors and London’s leading literary agents, publishers and editors.
The multi-award winning Spear’s has been described as ‘a cross between Forbes and Vanity Fair’ (Ben Goldsmith) and its editor Josh Spero was nominated for Editor of the Year at the 2012 BSME Awards. Editor-in-Chief William Cash has twice won Editor of the Year at the Independent Publisher Awards. Its website is spearsmagazine.com.
Contact Josh Spero, editor of Spear’s, for more information: josh.spero@spearswms.com
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