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Best First Biography Prize

Lea Ypi wins The Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize 2021 for Free

Lea Ypi wins The Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize 2021 for Free

Slightly Foxed and The Biographers’ Club are delighted to announce that the winner of the Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize 2021, chosen by judges Susannah Clapp, Horatio Clare and Johnny de Falbe, is Free: Coming of Age at the End of History by Lea Ypi. Free is an engrossing coming-of-age memoir in the midst of political upheaval. With acute insight and wit, Lea Ypi traces the limits of progress and the burden of the past, illuminating the spaces between ideals and reality, and the hopes and fears of people pulled along by the sweep of history.
‘Jonathan Phillips is a significant talent . . .’

‘Jonathan Phillips is a significant talent . . .’

‘There could be no grander narrative than the story of Sultan Saladin and his counter-Crusade. Jonathan Phillips’s thoroughly absorbing biography takes on a period and an individual of daunting complexity and strangeness, weaving a tale worthy of a leader who proved inspirational to both East and West. The Life and Legend of the Sultan Saladin is grippingly written, wonderfully researched, and most of all, very relevant to today . . . Jonathan Phillips is a significant talent.’

‘It’s a terrific honour . . .’

‘I’m over the moon, pleased as punch and downright delighted that my book has been shortlisted. It’s a terrific honour.’

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