Hilary Mantel recently won her second Booker Prize, having clinched two Bookers in a row, the latest for the second book of a planned trilogy – surely a first. As we never tire of mentioning here at the Spectator, Hilary was the inaugural winner of our Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize, back in 1987. Her stunning essay, on living a strange, segregated life in Saudi Arabia, can be found here.
The Shiva Naipaul prize, named after the late great Trinidadian author and brother of VS Naipaul, celebrates travel writing but not in the conventional sense. It is awarded every year to an essay that gives the most acute and profound observation of a culture alien to the writer. Hilary, in a blog she wrote for us in July, says the spirit of the prize is to be ‘original, incisive and unafraid’ in one’s writing.
Nor is Hilary the only luminary among former prizewinners – John Gimlette, our 1997 recipient, was lauded with the Dolman prize earlier this year for his travel book Wild Coast.
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