Duff Cooper Prize

21/01/2026

Congratulations to the five authors shortlisted for the 2026 Pol Roger Duff Cooper Prize for non-fiction.

Tim Bouverie: Allies at War, The Politics of Defeating Hi**er
Christopher Clark: A Scandal in Königsberg
Ian Leslie: John & Paul, A Love Story in Songs
Richard Holmes: The Boundless Deep, Young Tennyson, Science and the Crisis of Belief
Adam Weymouth: Lone Wolf, Walking the Faultlines of Europe

Stand by to learn who has won on March 16th - and meanwhile, get reading. https://duffcooperprize.org/ New College Library and Archives, Oxford New College, Oxford Pol Roger Portfolio

17/03/2025

‘"The Polynesians loved him": the astonishing revelations that cast Paul Gauguin in a new light'. Sue Prideaux discusses the subject of her Pol Roger Duff Cooper Prize-winning biography Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin in today’s The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2025/mar/17/polynesians-astonishing-revelations-paul-gauguin-syphilis-underage

You can join Sue Prideaux, along with Pol Roger Duff Cooper Prize judges Artemis Cooper and Miles Young, and Cal Revely-Calder, over a glass of Pol Roger Champagne at New College, Oxford as part of the Oxford Literary Festival.
Noon, Friday 4th April.
https://oxfordliteraryfestival.org/literature-events/2025/april-04/what-makes-a-great-non-fiction-book-and-just-why-it-matters

He has been tarred as a French colonialist who spread syphilis to underage girls in the South Seas. But, writes the author of an acclaimed new book, fresh discoveries challenge this view of the artist – and even show him as a hero

11/03/2025

‘He’s showing the two realities simultaneously, the mental reality and the physical reality and that’s just extraordinary.’
Listen Sue Prideaux, winner of The Pol Roger Duff Cooper Prize 2025 for Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin (Faber), interviewed by judge David Horspool, on The Times Literary Supplement podcast.
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/regular-features/the-podcast/the-tls-podcast-march-7-2025

03/03/2025

Congratulations to Sue Prideaux winner of The Pol Roger Duff Cooper Prize 2025 for Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin, published by Faber Books.

Artemis Cooper, chair of judges, said: ‘In recent years, Paul Gauguin’s paintings have been dismissed as a colonialist and exploitative view of exotic people in a lush landscape. Sue Prideaux’s Wild Thing brings to light a far more complex picture, of a man who struggled all his life - whether in Paris, Pont-Aven or Tahiti - to evoke his experience of being alive. She dazzles in the way she writes about his art and brings him alive in the context of his time.'

Sue Prideaux and Artemis Cooper, will feature together at the Oxford Literature Festival at 12 noon on 4th April 2025.

The Pol Roger Duff Cooper Prize celebrates the best in non-fiction writing. The first award was made in 1956, and it has been given annually ever since. The winner receives £5,000, a Magnum of Pol Roger Brut Réserve and a copy of Old Men Forget, Duff Cooper’s autobiography. The prize is run by the Duff Cooper Memorial Fund, a charity based at New College, Oxford.

28/02/2025

To celebrate The Pol Roger Duff Cooper 2025, each Friday we’ve profiled a shortlisted book. In our final week, before we announce the winner on Monday, discover Impossible Monsters: Dinosaurs, Darwin and the War between Science and Religion by Michael Taylor (The Bodley Head, Vintage Books).

This is the dramatic story of the crisis that engulfed science and religion when we discovered the dinosaurs. It takes us into the lives and minds of the extraordinary men and women who made these heretical discoveries, those who resisted them, as well as the pioneering thinkers, Darwin most famous among them, who took great risks to construct a new account of the earth’s and mankind’s origins.

‘Impossible Monsters vividly recaptures a vital time when men and women, gifted amateurs and diligent professionals addressed fundamental questions. As Michael Taylor shows, with elegance, fluency and scholarship, the "dinosaur wars" of the nineteenth century made and unmade reputations, and were fought at once with high principles and low cunning.’
- David Horspool, a judge of The Pol Roger Duff Cooper Prize

'Taylor, belongs to that rare class of writers who can effortlessly encompass both scientific arcana and intellectual currents. There are some deliciously provocative passages in this book'
Pratinav Anil in The Guardian

‘Michael Taylor offers an elegantly written, compellingly readable account of the "culture war between the guardians of orthodoxy and the agents of change."’
Gerard Helferich in The Wall Street Journal

The Pol Roger Duff Cooper Prize celebrates the best in non-fiction writing with a £5,000 Prize and a Magnum of Pol Roger Brut Réserve being awarded to the winner. It is generously supported by Champagne Pol Roger (Pol Roger Portfolio) and run by The Duff Cooper Memorial Fund, based at New College, Oxford.

The winner of The Pol Roger Duff Cooper Prize 2025 will be announced on Monday 3rd March.

21/02/2025

To celebrate The Pol Roger Duff Cooper 2025, each Friday we’re profiling a shortlisted book, This week we dive into Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prideaux (Faber Books).

Paul Gauguin is chiefly known as the giant of post-Impressionist painting whose bold colours and compositions rocked the Western art world. It is less well known that he was a stockbroker in Paris and that after the 1882 financial crash he struggled to sustain his artistry, and worked as a tarpaulin salesman in Copenhagen, a canal digger in Panama City, and a journalist exposing the injustices of French colonial rule in Tahiti. Drawing from a wealth of new material and access to the artist's family, this myth-busting work invites us to see Gauguin anew.

‘In recent years, Paul Gauguin's paintings have been dismissed as a colonialist and exploitative view of exotic people in a lush landscape. Sue Prideaux's WILD THING brings to light a far more complex picture, of a man who struggled all his life - whether in Paris, Pont-Aven or Tahiti - to evoke his experience of being alive. She brings him to life in the context of his time and I was dazzled by the way she writes about his art.’
- Artemis Cooper, chair of The Pol Roger Duff Cooper Prize

‘Sue Prideaux's new biography has real bite… The author does a superb job of re-examining the ways in which Gauguin "smashed the established Western canon”’
Elizabeth Lowry in Times Literary Supplement

A ‘scintillating new biography of the artist... Wild Thing’s purpose is “not to condemn, not to excuse,” Prideaux writes, “but simply to shed new light on the man and the myth.”’
Nadiaw Beard in Financial Times

The Pol Roger Duff Cooper Prize celebrates the best in non-fiction writing with a £5,000 Prize and a Magnum of Pol Roger Brut Réserve being awarded to the winner. It is generously supported by Champagne Pol Roger (Pol Roger Portfolio) and run by The Duff Cooper Memorial Fund, based at New College, Oxford.

The winner of The Pol Roger Duff Cooper Prize 2025 will be announced on Monday 3rd March.
https://duffcooperprize.org/

17/02/2025

Fantastic to see Five Books briefly become Six Books to embrace The Pol Roger Duff Cooper Prize Shortlist! Find out what makes each of these books unmissable with prize judge Minoo Dinshaw.

It's a nonfiction book prize that values "style, rigour, argument, meatiness, readability, freshness, oddity and individuality," says Minoo Dinshaw, author of Friends in Youth and one of this year's judges. He introduces the six brilliant books that made the shortlist of this year's Pol Roger Duff C...

14/02/2025

To celebrate The Pol Roger Duff Cooper 2025, each Friday we’re profiling a different shortlisted book, this Friday we’re raising a glass to:

THE SCAPEGOAT: The Brilliant Brief Life of the Duke of Buckingham
by Lucy Hughes-Hallett
Published by 4th Estate Books

As King James I’s favourite, Buckingham was also his confidant, gatekeeper, right-hand man and lover. When Charles I succeeded his father, he was similarly enthralled and made Buckingham his best friend and mentor. A dazzling figure on horseback and a skilful player of the political game, Buckingham rapidly transformed the influence his beauty gave him into immense wealth and power. He became one of the most flamboyant and enigmatic Englishmen at the heart of seventeenth-century royal and political life.

‘Lucy Hughes-Hallett's book makes us look again at the Duke of Buckingham, favourite to two kings, allowing us to see him as he saw himself - a "benign impresario" rather than a "despoiler of kingdoms". She does so with as much brilliance and dazzle as Buckingham himself, while mining her material with care and originality.’
David Horspool, The Pol Roger Duff Cooper Prize Judge

‘compulsively readable and elegantly written pages, she has brought Buckingham gloriously alive: the paradoxes of his life, and the court society in which he was the favourite'
Jane Shaw in the Financial Times

‘It is about how two things can be true at once: how people with power, wealth and privilege might act without evil intent, and in line with societal norms, yet be responsible for immense harm. How you can be a guilty scapegoat.’
Ophelia Field in Times Literary Supplement

The Pol Roger Duff Cooper Prize celebrates the best in non-fiction writing with a £5,000 Prize and a Magnum of Pol Roger Brut Réserve being awarded to the winner. It is generously supported by Champagne Pol Roger (Pol Roger Portfolio) and run by The Duff Cooper Memorial Fund, based at New College, Oxford.

The winner of The Pol Roger Duff Cooper Prize 2025 will be announced on Monday 3rd March.
https://duffcooperprize.org/

07/02/2025

To celebrate The Pol Roger Duff Cooper 2025, each Friday we’re profiling a different shortlisted book, this Friday we’re celebrating:

Forbidden Desire in Early Modern Europe: Male-male s*xual relations 1400 – 1750
by Noel Malcolm
Published by Oxford Academic (Oxford University Press))

Noel Malcolm's masterly study does something which no previous scholar has attempted: giving a truly pan-European account of the whole phenomenon of male-male s*xual relations in the early modern period. Original, critical, lucidly written and deeply researched, this work will change the way we think about the history of homos*xuality in early modern Europe.

'A brilliant piece of scholarship, applying for the first time a genuinely historical frame to same s*x behaviour in the past. It is forensic but utterly engrossing. It is definitive in rebutting the sloppy anachronism of “gay history” and in distinguishing between homos*xual identity (now) and homos*xual acts (then). It is beautifully written, and each “act” unearthed and described is a scrap of evidence which builds up into a magisterial and moving narrative.'
- Miles Young, Warden of New College, Oxford, and a judge of The Pol Roger Duff Cooper Prize

‘a book of startling originality and depth. The abundance of Malcolm’s archival research, the range of languages and the geographical diversity of his material are stupendous’
- Rhodri Lewis, The Spectator

'In extraordinary wide-ranging detail it reveals a particular pattern of male same-s*x behaviour detectable over three millennia ... that does not look like what the modern West calls homos*xuality.'
Diarmaid MacCulloch in The Times and The Sunday Times

‘Forbidden Desire in Early Modern Europe: Male-Male Sexual Relations, 1400-1750 is astonishing: one of the most compelling and accomplished pieces of social history that I have read.’
- Richard Davenport-Hines, Prospect Magazine

The Pol Roger Duff Cooper Prize celebrates the best in non-fiction writing with a £5,000 Prize and a Magnum of Pol Roger Brut Réserve being awarded to the winner. It is generously supported by Champagne Pol Roger (Pol Roger Portfolio) and run by The Duff Cooper Memorial Fund, based at New College, Oxford.

The winner of The Pol Roger Duff Cooper Prize 2025 will be announced on Monday 3rd March.

04/02/2025

23/01/2025

Congratulations to the authors, editors and publishers of the six books shortlisted for the Pol Roger Duff Cooper prize for non-fiction.

All these authors challenge received opinion, whether rehabilitating Paul Gauguin in defiance of fashionable condemnation (Sue Prideaux: Wild Thing), exploding assumptions about s*x between men in early modern Europe (Noel Malcolm: Forbidden Desire), unveiling the Duke of Buckingham as a formidable power in the world of the early Stuarts (Lucy Hughes-Hallett: The Scapegoat) or illuminating the unexpected success of post-war Italian democracy (Mark Gilbert: Italy Reborn).

Michael Taylor (Impossible Monsters) reveals how the emergence of dinosaur fossils gavea new urgency to the battles between science and religion, while Kathryn Hughes (Catland) uses the transformation of the half-feral cat into a pampered pet to shine a surprising light on the emergence of the modern 20th century.

Winner announced 3 March 2025. Pol Roger Portfolio New College, Oxford