Andrew Lycett – Year of election 2009

Andrew Lycett is a biographer who began his published career in 1987 with a book on Gaddafi and the Libyan Revolution, with co-author David Blundy. This was followed by enthusiastically-reviewed biographies of great British mythmakers: Ian Fleming, Rudyard Kipling, Conan Doyle and Dylan Thomas. Terry Eagleton described Lycett’s Kipling biography as “magisterial” in choosing it as his International Book of the Year in the Times Literary Supplement, while Jan Morris named his Dylan Thomas – A New Life her book of the year in The Times, describing it as “majestically thorough, readable and compassionate.”