The Duff Cooper Prize is a literary prize awarded annually for the best work of history, biography, political science or (very occasionally) poetry, published in English or French. The prize was established in honour of Duff Cooper, a British diplomat, Cabinet member and acclaimed author. The prize was first awarded in 1956 to Alan Moorehead for his Gallipoli. At present, the winner receives a first edition copy of Duff Cooper's autobiography Old Men Forget and a cheque for £5,000.
After Duff Cooper's death in 1954, a group of his friends decided to establish a trust to endow a literary prize in his memory. The trust appoints five judges. Two of them are ex officio: the Warden of New College, Oxford, and a member of Duff Cooper's family (initially, Duff Cooper's son, John Julius Norwich for the first thirty-six years, and then John Julius' daughter, Artemis Cooper). The other three judges appointed by the trust serve for five years and they appoint their own successors. The first three judges were Maurice Bowra, Cyril Connolly and Raymond Mortimer. At present, the three appointed judges are writer and biographer Patrick Marnham, film critic John McBratney, and former TLS editor Lindsay Duguid.
From 2013, the prize has been known as The Pol Roger Duff Cooper Prize, following a sponsorship by Pol Roger.
Source: Duff Cooper Prize
1956 – Alan Moorehead, Gallipoli
1957 – Lawrence Durrell, Bitter Lemons
1958 – John Betjeman, Collected Poems
1959 – Patrick Leigh Fermor, Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese
1960 – Andrew Young, Collected Poems
1961 – Jocelyn Baines, Joseph Conrad
1962 – Michael Howard, The Franco-Prussian War
1963 – Aileen Ward, John Keats
1964 – Ivan Morris, The World of the Shining Prince
1965 – George Painter, Marcel Proust
1966 – Nirad C. Chaudhuri, The Continent of Circe
1967 – J. A. Baker, The Peregrine
1968 – Roy Fuller, New Poems
1969 – John Gross, The Man of Letters
1970 – Enid McLeod, Charles of Orleans: Prince & Poet
1971 – Geoffrey Grigson, Discoveries of Bones and Stones
1972 – Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf
1973 – Robin Lane Fox, Alexander the Great
1974 – Jon Stallworthy, Wilfred Owen
1975 – Seamus Heaney, North
1976 – Denis Mack Smith, Mussolini's Roman Empire
1977 – E. R. Dodds, Missing Persons
1978 – Mark Girouard, Life in the English Country House
1979 – Geoffrey Hill, Tenebrae
1980 – Robert Bernard Martin, Tennyson, The Unquiet Heart
1981 – Victoria Glendinning, Edith Sitwell: A Unicorn Among the Lions
1982 – Richard Ellmann, James Joyce
1983 – Peter Porter, Collected Poems
1984 – Hilary Spurling, Ivy When Young: The Early Life of Ivy Compton-Burnett 1884 – 1919
1985 – Ann Thwaite, Edmund Gosse: A Literary Landscape, 1849–1928
1986 – Alan Crawford, C. R. Ashbee: Architect, Designer, and Romantic Socialist
1987 – Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore
1988 – Humphrey Carpenter, A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound
1989 – Ian Gibson, Federico Garcia Lorca
1990 – Hugh Cecil and Mirabel Cecil, Clever Hearts: Desmond and Molly Maccarthy: A Biography
1991 – Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius
1992 – Peter Hennessy, Never Again: Britain, 1945–1951
1993 – John Keegan, A History of Warfare
1994 – David Gilmour, Curzon: Imperial Statesman
1995 – Gitta Sereny, Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth
1996 – Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer: A Life
1997 – James Buchan, Frozen Desire: An Inquiry into the Meaning of Money
1998 – Richard Holmes, Coleridge: Darker Reflections
1999 – Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost
2000 – Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes
2001 – Margaret MacMillan, Peacemakers: The Paris Peace Conference of 1919 and Its Attempt to End War
2002 – Jane Ridley, The Architect and his Wife
2003 – Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History
2004 – Mark Mazower, Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews, 1430–1950
2005 – Maya Jasanoff, Edge of Empire: Conquest and Collecting on the Eastern Frontiers of the British Empire
2006 – William Dalrymple, The Last Mughal, The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi 1857
2007 – Graham Robb, The Discovery of France
2008 – Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
2009 – Robert Service, Trotsky: A Biography
2010 – Sarah Bakewell, How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at An Answer
2011 – Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist
2012 – Sue Prideaux, Strindberg – A Life
2013 – Lucy Hughes-Hallett, The Pike: Gabriele D’Annunzio
2014 – Patrick McGuinness, Other People's Countries: A Journey into Memory
2015 – Ian Bostridge, Schubert's Winter Journey: Anatomy of an Obsession
