Winners of the four categories in this year's Whitbread Book Awards were announced in London yesterday. Dominating the news as expected is the selection of the conversational, gentle and often moving Birthday Letters, the last book by the late Ted Hughes as winner of the poetry category.
Published last January, the book followed Hughes's winning of last year's Whitbread Book of the Year for his outstanding collection, Tales From Ovid. Hughes died on October 28th. Birthday Letters has been well received critically and was also a best-seller, always an achievement for a poetry book.
It is true it attracted an immense amount of attention on a biographical level as through it, Hughes broke the long silence he had maintained over his early, painful marriage to the American poet, Sylvia Plath. She committed suicide in 1963 and her ghost continued to stalk Hughes. Details of his private life often entered discussion of Hughes the poet. Yet in this last book, all the poems, with two exceptions, are addressed to Plath. It is as if he had finally decided to confront and resolve the entire episode. South African-born, English-based Justin Cartwright won the best novel category with Leading the Cheers, a thriller about a serial killer of sorts set in the US. Giles Foden's The Last King of Scotland, a black comedy based on Idi Amin's Ugandan dictatorship, won the best first novel. The biography award has gone to Amanda Foreman's Georgina, Duchess of Devonshire, the life of Georgina Spenser, an 18th century icon whose life has parallels with that of her descendant, Diana Spencer.
All four books, with Hughes as strong favourite, although Foreman will have some claims, now automatically become the shortlist competing for the £21,000 Whitbread Book of the Year Award, which will be announced on January 26th.
