Artemis Cooper, Sue Prideaux and Cal Revely-Calder talks to Miles Young

Artemis Cooper, the chair of the Pol Roger Duff Cooper Prize for non-fiction, discusses what makes great histories and biographies stand out from the crowd, with the 2025 winner Sue Prideaux, author of Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin, and the literary editor of The Telegraph Cal Revely-Calder. Entry to the event includes a free glass of Pol Roger Champagne.

Cooper is a writer and granddaughter of Alfred Duff Cooper, a British Conservative Party politician and diplomat after whom the Duff Cooper Prize was named. The Duff Cooper Prize has been honouring excellence in history, biography, travel, politics, poetry and literary criticism for almost 70 years.

Prideaux’s biographies have won many of the top prizes for non-fiction including the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Edvard Munch: Behind the Scream, the Duff Cooper Prize a first time for Strindberg: A Life, and the Hawthornden Prize for I Am Dynamite!: A Life of Nietzsche.

Discussions are chaired by Miles Young, the Warden of New College and a judge of the Duff Cooper Prize.