Last Morning in Al Hamra – Shiva Naipaul Prize, 1987

The Spectator/ Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize for travel writing was first awarded in 1987, and its first-ever winner was Hilary Mantel, who has since won the 2009 Booker Prize for Wolf Hall. Below is Hilary’s prize-winning piece on Saudi Arabia; the judges ‘particularly admired her ability to convey not only the discovery of a culture new to her but also the distaste which the discovery aroused’, said then-editor of The Spectator Charles Moore.

To learn more about the Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize, and how you can enter, click here. To read Hilary Mantel’s recent blog on what winning the prize meant to her, click here.

Last Morning in Al Hamra

Hilary Mantel

There are children, frail and moribund, who live inside plastic bubbles; their immune systems have not developed, and so they have to be protected from the outside world, their air specially filtered, and their nourishment — you cannot call it food – passed to them through special ducts, by gloved and sterile hands.