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, Gallipoli1957 – Lawrence Durrell, Bitter Lemons1958 – John Betjeman, Collected Poems1959 – Patrick Leigh Fermor, Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese1960 – Andrew Young, Collected Poems1961 – Jocelyn Baines, Joseph Conrad1962 – Michael Howard, The Franco-Prussian War1963 – Aileen Ward, John Keats1964 – Ivan Morris, The World of the Shining Prince1965 – George Painter, Marcel Proust1966 – Nirad C. Chaudhuri, The Continent of Circe1967 – J. A. Baker, The Peregrine1968 – Roy Fuller, New Poems1969 – John Gross, The Man of Letters1970 – Enid McLeod, Charles of Orleans: Prince & Poet1971 – Geoffrey Grigson, Discoveries of Bones and Stones1972 – Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf1973 – Robin Lane Fox, Alexander the Great1974 – Jon Stallworthy, Wilfred Owen1975 – Seamus Heaney, North1976 – Denis Mack Smith, Mussolini's Roman Empire1977 – E. R. Dodds, Missing Persons1978 – Mark Girouard, Life in the English Country House1979 – Geoffrey Hill, Tenebrae1980 – Robert Bernard Martin, Tennyson, The Unquiet Heart1981 – Victoria Glendinning, Edith Sitwell: A Unicorn Among the Lions1982 – Richard Ellmann, James Joyce1983 – Peter Porter, Collected Poems1984 – Hilary Spurling, Ivy When Young: The Early Life of Ivy Compton-Burnett 1884 – 19191985 – Ann Thwaite, Edmund Gosse: A Literary Landscape, 1849–19281986 – Alan Crawford, C. R. Ashbee: Architect, Designer, and Romantic Socialist1987 – Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore1988 – Humphrey Carpenter, A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound1989 – Ian Gibson, Federico Garcia Lorca1990 – Hugh Cecil and Mirabel Cecil, Clever Hearts: Desmond and Molly Maccarthy: A Biography1991 – Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius1992 – Peter Hennessy, Never Again: Britain, 1945–19511993 – John Keegan, A History of Warfare1994 – David Gilmour, Curzon: Imperial Statesman1995 – Gitta Sereny, Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth1996 – Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer: A Life1997 – James Buchan, Frozen Desire: An Inquiry into the Meaning of Money1998 – Richard Holmes, Coleridge: Darker Reflections1999 – Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost2000 – Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes2001 – Margaret MacMillan, Peacemakers: The Paris Peace Conference of 1919 and Its Attempt to End War2002 – Jane Ridley, The Architect and his Wife2003 – Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History2004 – Mark Mazower, Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews, 1430–19502005 – Maya Jasanoff, Edge of Empire: Conquest and Collecting on the Eastern Frontiers of the British Empire2006 – William Dalrymple, The Last Mughal, The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi 18572007 – Graham Robb, The Discovery of France2008 – Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer2009 – Robert Service, Trotsky: A Biography2010 – Sarah Bakewell, How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at An Answer2011 – Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist2012 – Sue Prideaux, Strindberg – A Life2013 – Lucy Hughes-Hallett, The Pike: Gabriele D’Annunzio2014 – Patrick McGuinness, Other People's Countries: A Journey into Memory2015 – Ian Bostridge, Schubert's Winter Journey: Anatomy of an Obsession