Public Servant Lifestyle

Annual new book prize awarded by Manchester's historic Portico Library.

The £3,000 Portico Prize for Literature - the only book prize exclusively for books about, or set mainly in, the North West of England - has been awarded to Andrew Biswell for his work The Real Life of Anthony Burgess.

The award comes 17 years after Burgess himself won the Portico Prize, presented to him during his last visit to Manchester in 1989, just four years before he died. The runner-up, and winner of the fiction category, was Manchester-based crime writer Val McDermid for The Grave Tattoo.

This year's judges were controversial children's author Melvin Burgess, the doyenne of BBC Radio 4’s Womans’ Hour Jenni Murray, and proprietor (of Manchester's historic Portico Library, where the award is originated), writer Dr David Thame.

The Real Life of Anthony Burgess

Awarding the prize, the judges said: “This is an exemplary and scholarly work, but also a work of literature in its own right. The quality of the writing matters, particularly if you’re writing about Burgess, a man obsessed with language and word-play.”

“Dr Biswell tells his story in intelligent, adult English, entirely unencumbered by the constipated jargon of university Eng Lit departments. His bright, often witty and sometimes agreeably facetious prose, certainly qualifies as literature in the eyes of this year’s judges.”

“We’re afraid this book won’t win Dr Biswell many points in the curious world of literary criticism where lavish deployment of the names of the latest fashionable theorists matters far more than careful research, accomplished writing and human insight...But these qualities are more than enough to win this year’s Portico Prize for Literature.”

The full shortlist was:

Howard Jacobson - Kalooki Nights (Jonathan Cape, 2006)
Bill Keeth - Every Street in Manchester (Limited Edition Press, 2005)
Val McDermid - The Grave Tattoo (Harper Collins, 2006)
Andrew Biswell - The Real Life of Anthony Burgess (Picador, 2005)
Rosie Childs with Diane Taylor - Catch me Before I fall (Virgin Books, 2006)
Michael Macilwee - The Gangs of Liverpool (Milo Books, 2006)
Harold L. Platt - Shock Cities: The Environmental Transformation and Reform of Manchester and Chicago (Chicago University Press, 2005)
W.A. Speck - Robert Southey: Man of Letters (Yale University Press, 2006)

The Portico Library & Gallery

The winner was announced at a special dinner held at the Midland Hotel in the centre of Manchester, close to the library itself - with the shortlist selected from fifty initial entries.

Previous high profile winners include former police chief John Stalker, and biographer Jenny Uglow. The prize is made possible by the generous sponsorship of The Zochonis Charitable Trust. The Portico Prize will next be awarded in 2008.

The Portico Library & Gallery close to Manchester Art Gallery (MAG) at 57 Moseley Street in the city centre first opened in 1806 and is a Grade II listed buiding. Boasting Elizabeth Gaskell - North and South (1855), Mary Barton (1848) - and Thomas De Quincy (Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1822), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1834)) among former readers the building is currently occupied on the ground floor by a public house, with the entrance to the magnificent library (occupying the first floor of the building) around the side of the buildings' main entrance, on Charlotte Street.

For further details please contact the Librarian Emma Marigliano via email or telephone 0161 236 6785.

More information available in Home Security, Arts & Culture, Books