Name Duncan Hamilton | Role Journalist | |
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Books Provided You Don’t Kiss Me, Provided You Don't Kiss Me, A Last English Summer, Harold Larwood, Harold Larwood Proof | ||
Duncan Hamilton (born December 1958) is a British author and newspaper journalist and two-time winner of the prestigious William Hill Sports Book of the Year award.
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Hamilton won the first William Hill Sports Book Award with the 2007 memoir Provided You Don't Kiss Me: 20 Years With Brian Clough., an account of his time at the Nottingham Evening Post where he worked for more than 20 years. The book also won the 'Best Football Book' category of the 2008 British Sports Book Awards.
He was the paper's Nottingham Forest reporter during the club's glory years and covered both of Forest's historic victorious European Cup campaigns (1979 and 1980) for the newspaper. During his time covering Forest, Hamilton developed a close, if at times testy, relationship with the club's famously outspoken manager, Brian Clough. Some accounts even claim that Clough hated Hamilton.
In Provided You Don't Kiss Me, Hamilton claims he bonded with Clough after the manager learned he, like Clough, was from the north-east of England. He provides an eyewitness account of the relationship between Clough and his assistant, Peter Taylor, and charts Clough's demise and descent into alcoholism.
FHM called the book a "superb portrait of the conflicted, contradictory man [that] doesn't duck his uglier aspects." It quickly became a bestseller and won the William Hill award against very strong competition.
After winning the £18,000 first prize, Hamilton wrote a column for the Yorkshire Post, where he currently works as a deputy editor, expressing his surprise and delight at the book's success.
In 2009, Hamilton won a second William Hill Sports Book of the Year award for his work on cricketer Harold Larwood; a biography of the outstanding fast bowler Harold Larwood, who was a protagonist in the controversial 'Bodyline' series between Australia and England in 1932-33. The book also won the 'Best Biography' category of the 2010 British Sports Book Awards.