The Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction was last night carried off, not by Alan Bennet's Untold Stories, as many had expected, but by a biography partly inspired by the film Shakespeare in Love. American academic James Shapiro's 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare was described by Peter Kemp in his Sunday Times review as :... the product of marathon scholarship, inspired insight, narrative flair, astute surmise and searching intelligence ... (it) brings Shakespeare’s outer and inner worlds, and the interplay between them, alive with such thrilling immediacyMeanwhile, poet Nick Laird has won the Betty Trask Award for his "lad-lit novel" Utterly Monkey.
A reviewer in the Independent describes it as:
'a novel that combines lad-lit staples – car chases, pub crawls and beautiful women – with grown-up savoir faire.'
