Philip Hoare nabs Britain’s top non-fiction book prize
A book about a life long obsession with whales inspired by the literary classic Moby-Dick has won'the UK’s most prestigious non-fiction prize. Leviathan, or The Whale by Philip Hoare(Fourth Estate) was tonight named the winner of the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction 2009.
Jacob Weisberg, one of the judges, commented:
What made Leviathan stand out in a shortlist of wonderful reads was Philip Hoare’s lifelong passion for his subject and his skill in making his readers share it. His prose is dream-like and rises to the condition of literature.
After Herman Melville published his book Moby Dick in 1851, no one saw whales in quite the same way again, having created a modern myth out of an already legendary beast. But what is the true nature of the whale? Why does it fascinate us?
In Leviathan, Philip Hoare seeks to locate and identify his life-long obsession with this mythical creature of the sea. From his childhood fascination with the gigantic models of London’s Natural History Museum to adult encounters with the wild animals themselves, Philip Hoare has been obsessed with whales. Leviathan is a gripping voyage of discovery into the heart of this obsession and Moby-Dick, the book that inspired it. Travelling around the globe and taking the reader deep into the whale’s domain, Philip Hoare sheds light on our perennial fascination with whales, whose nature remains tantalizingly undiscovered.
This year's shortlist also included:
- Lords of Finance by Liaquat Ahamed
- Bad Science by Ben Goldacre
- The Lost City of Z by David Grann
- The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Holmes
- Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate about the Nature of Reality by Manjit Kumar
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