Bibliofemme News
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09/12/2005
Biography of homeless man wins First Book Award
Alexander Masters' biography of homeless man Stuart Shorter - Stuart: A Life
Backwards - has won the £10,000 Guardian First Book Award.
Shorter, who became friends with Masters in 1998, was killed by a train in
2002. He never got to see the published book.
It was at his suggestion that Masters wrote it in reverse, starting with his
homelessness and drug addiction, time spent in prison back to his difficult
and abusive childhood.
Chair of the judges and literary editor of the Guardian Claire Armitstead
said: "If you were just going on the subject matter of Stuart, you'd have
thought it would be a depressing but worthy read."
"But Alexander Masters has such a light touch, and the character of Stuart
himself is so spikily attractive and so admirable in unexpected ways, that
it becomes absolutely compelling and at times laugh-aloud funny. Part of the
genius of the book lies in the matching of a topsy-turvy structure to a
topsy-turvy life."
The Guardian First Book Award is open to new writing in both the areas of
fiction and non-fiction.
The other shortlisted books were Richard Benson's memoir The Farm; Reza
Aslan's No god but God: The Origins, Evolution and the Future of Islam;
Suketu Mehta's history of Bombay, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found and
Rattawut Lapcharoensap's fictional short stories, Sightseeing.
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