Pevsner biography shortlisted for Duff Cooper Prize

January 18, 2012

Susie Harries has been shortlisted for the 2011 Duff Cooper Prize for her biography of Nikolaus Pevsner.

The annual prize, which was first awarded in 1956, celebrates the best in non-fiction writing and was set up in memory of the statesman, diplomat and author, Duff Cooper, after his death in 1954.

Nikolaus Pevsner: The Life tells the extraordinary story of scholar and academic Nikolaus Pevsner, who was born into a Russian-Jewish family in Leipzig in 1902. When, in 1933 Jews were no longer permitted to teach in German universities, he lost his job and looked for employment in England. Here, over a long and amazingly industrious career, he made himself an authority on the exploration and enjoyment of English art and architecture, so much so that his magisterial county-by-county series of 46 books on The Buildings of England is usually referred to simply as 'Pevsner'.

In this remarkable book, Susie Harries explores the truth about Nikolaus Pevsner's reported sympathies with elements of Nazi ideology, his internment in England as an enemy alien and his assimilation into his country of exile. His Heftchen - secret diaries he kept from the age of fourteen for another sixty years - reveal hidden aspirations and anxieties, as do his numerous letters (he wrote to his wife, Lola, every day that they were apart). Harries is the first biographer to have read Pevsner's private papers and, through them, to have seen into the workings of his mind..

The winner of the £5000 prize will be announced on 29 February 2012.