Bibliofemme News

The announcement was made yesterday evening at an awards ceremony in London.

Matisse the Master beat odds-on favourite The Accidental by Ali Smith, first-time novelist Tash Aw (The Harmony Silk Factory), poet Christopher Logue for Cold Calls and children's book The New Policeman by Irish based author Kate Thompson, for the overall prize.

Matisse the Master is the second and final volume of a work which took Spurling 15 years.

Michael Morpurgo, chair of the judges, said: "We all agreed when you get to the end you're sorry it's finished, an extraordinary achievement for a book of this length."

The other judges added: "A masterpiece - one of the landmark biographies of the last few years which has already changed the history of art."

This is the fifth biography to take the overall prize. Last year, Andrea Levy took the title with her novel, Small Island, which has since gone on to become a major bestseller.

Spurling had unprecedented and unrestricted access to Matisse's voluminous family correspondence and other new material in private archives.

In the book she documents a lifetime of desperation and self-doubt, exacerbated by Matisse's attempts to counteract the violence and disruption of the twentieth century in paintings that seem now effortlessly serene and stable.

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