We are delighted to announce that the 2016 Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography has been awarded to Andrew Gailey for The Lost Imperialist – Lord Dufferin, Memory and Mythmaking in an Age of Celebrity (John Murray).

Judges Roy Foster, Antonia Fraser, Flora Fraser, David Gilmour and Munro Price chose Gailey’s book about Frederick Hamiton-Temple-Blackwood, 1st Marquess of Dufferin and Ava; a Victorian diplomat and politician once described as the ‘most popular man in Europe’.

Roy Foster, Chair of the judges said: 

Andrew Gailey’s The Lost Imperialist paints a masterly portrait of a late-Victorian grandee whose fame and glamour dazzled his contemporaries, but whose private persona was strangely complex and heavily inflected by his inheritance from his scandalous Sheridan forebears. It is also a panoramic study of the uses of celebrity in the age of empire. This combination of psychological acuteness and historical vision makes it an exceptionally appropriate winner of the Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography.

Gailey, a history teacher and author of a number of studies of nineteenth and twentieth century Anglo-Irish relations, will be presented with the prize at the SoA’s 2016 Authors’ Awards, at The Army and Navy Club in Pall Mall on 21 June.

On receiving the prize, Gailey commented:

I am thrilled and honoured to receive this award for this biography of Lord Dufferin. Dufferin always had a very keen eye for honours and no doubt he would have claimed this award as his own if he could. As perhaps he should, for he was a tremendous subject.

The Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography is generously sponsored by Flora Fraser and Peter Soros in affectionate memory of Elizabeth Longford, the acclaimed biographer.