Biography of artist wins Whitbread Prize

THE second volume of a biography of Henri Matisse, which took 15 years to complete, tonight became the surprise winner of the Whitbread Book of the Year prize.

Hilary Spurling, 65, won the £25,000 (€36,000) award for Matisse The Master, which is only the fifth biography to scoop the prestigious title in 20 years.

Judges admitted the choice of winner had been "unbelievably close", with Irish writer Kate Thompson's children's book The New Policeman just edged into second place.

Ms Spurling had unprecedented and unrestricted access to family correspondence and other new material in private archives.

In Matisse The Master, she documents a lifetime of desperation and self-doubt by presenting the painter as he saw himself.

Ms Spurling's previous subjects have included Ivy Compton-Burnett and Sonia Orwell.

The prize pits the winners of five book categories poetry, biography, children's, debut novel and novel against each other.

Ali Smith, 43, who won the novel award for The Accidental, had been the bookies' favourite to take the prize last night.

Chair of the judges Michael Morpurgo said: "So many people felt that this was a massive work but yet it didn't read like it. It read like a story. We were reading about this man and his pictures and his life, his family, his travels.

"Somehow she managed to paint a picture of a painter that was accessible to people not necessarily familiar with art.

"It's an extraordinary achievement to write a book of that length, which when you get to the end you are sorry it's finished.

"Everyone acknowledged it was an extraordinary work."

Spurling also beat Tash Aw, who won the First Novel Award for The Harmony Silk Factory and Christopher Logue, the Poetry Award winner for Cold Calls.

The judges revealed that the vote had been split evenly between Spurling and Thompson until a system "like proportional representation" was created to find a winner.

Mr Morpurgo said: "It was unbelievably close. I've never been in a judging panel which was so close. "This book has opened my eyes to great art and done it in an extraordinary way."

He praised Logue, whose reworking of The Iliad came third, for "the extraordinary power of his language" and Thompson, saying "the dialogue was extraordinary. We really got to know her characters".