Professor Roy Foster, FRHistS, FRSL, FBA...

Chair of Judges

Emeritus Professor of Irish History at Oxford; Emeritus Professor of Irish History and Literature at Queen Mary, University of London.

Roy Foster has won acclaim for his histories of Ireland and for biographies of Charles Stewart Parnell and Lord Randolph Churchill. His W. B. Yeats: A Life won the 1997 James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and Vivid Faces: The Revolutionary Generation in Ireland, 1890 – 1923 (2015), secured a British Academy Medal and the Morris D. Forkosch Prize from the American Historical Association. Professor Foster’s most recent book, On Seamus Heaney, was published in 2020. In 2021 he was awarded an Irish Presidential Distinguished Service Award in Arts, Culture & Sport, and in 2023 the Lifetime Achievement Award by the An Post Irish Book Awards.

Flora Fraser, FRHistS...

Chair of the Prize; granddaughter of Elizabeth Longford

Flora Fraser, Chair of the Prize and a Founding Judge, is the author of six historical biographies, including Beloved Emma: The Life of Emma, Lady Hamilton (1986), Princesses: The Daughters of George III (2004), and The Washingtons: George & Martha, which won the 2016 George Washington Book Prize. Her latest book, ‘Pretty Young Rebel’: The Life of Flora Macdonald, was published in 2022.

Lady Antonia Fraser, CH, DBE, FRSL...

Chair Emerita of the Prize; daughter of Elizabeth Longford

Antonia Fraser’s many historical biographies include Mary Queen of Scots (1969), which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, The Weaker Vessel, which won the 1984 Wolfson Prize, and Marie Antoinette: the Journey, winner of the 2001 Enid Mcleod Literary Prize, awarded by the Franco-British Association. She was the recipient, in 2000, of the Historical Association Norton Medlicott Medal and, in 2013, of the Biographers’ Club Lifetime Services to Biography Prize. She is also the author of works of history including The King and The Catholics: The Fight for Rights,1829, which won the inaugural Catholic Herald History Prize in 2019. Her most recent biographies are The Case of the Married Woman: Caroline Norton: A 19th Century Heroine Who Wanted Justice for Women (2021) and Lady Caroline Lamb: A Free Spirit (2023).

Antonia Fraser was co-founder of the Authors’ Foundation, at the Society of Authors, in 1984, and was Chairman of the Society, 1974-1975.

Richard Davenport-Hines...

Historian and biographer

Richard Davenport Hines is one of Britain’s most versatile biographers. He was formerly a Research Fellow at the London School of Economics and is a quondam Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. His Dudley Docker: The Life and Times of a Trade Warrior (1984) was joint winner of the Wolfson Prize for History and Biography in 1985, and winner of the Wadsworth Prize for Business History. Among many other books, he has published Auden (1995), Ettie – the Intimate Life and Dauntless Spirit of Lady Desborough (2008), Universal Man: The Seven Lives of John Maynard Keynes (2015) and King Edward VII: The Cosmopolitan King (2016). Most recently, he has edited a volume of Hugh Trevor-Roper’s diaries: The China Journals: Ideology and Intrigue in the 1960s (2020), and published Picture Perfect: an anthology of poetry and prose (2023).

Richard was formerly an adviser to the Oxford Dictional of National Biography, to which he has contributed many entries. He was also a trustee of the Royal Literary Fund for ten years and of the London Library.

Professor Rana Mitter...

ST Lee Chair in US-Asia Relations, Harvard Kennedy School

He is the author of, among other books, A Bitter Revolution: China’s Struggle with the Modern World (2004), for which he won the Times Higher Education Supplement Young Academic Author of the Year Award. His subsequent history, China’s War with Japan, 1937-45: The Struggle for Survival, won the 2014 RUSI/Duke of Westminster’s Medal for Military Literature. Eastern Eye ACTA, meanwhile, named Professor Mitter ‘Best Presenter’ in 2019, when his Chinese Characters, a series of historical portraits now available as a podcast, were aired on BBC Radio 4. Professor Mitter’s most recent book, China’s Good War: How World War II is Shaping a New Nationalism, was published in 2020, in which year he won the Medlicott Medal from the Historical Association for Service to History.