Mary Stuart book named queen of the Whitbread

Published on Thursday 6 January 2005 00:27

A BOOK that claims Mary Queen of Scots was "the best queen England never had" yesterday won the Whitbread Biography Award - and may soon be turned into a feature film.

My Heart is My Own by John Guy, an honorary professor at St Andrews University, makes the case that Mary was a perfectly competent monarch who was brought down by the scheming of ultra-Protestant advisers in the English court.

The book now goes forward to compete against the winners of four other categories, also announced yesterday, for the overall Whitbread Book of the Year Award, which is worth 30,000.

This will be decided by a panel of judges including Hugh Grant, Mariella Frostrup, Roy Hattersley, Michael Portillo and Sir Trevor McDonald. The winner will be announced on 25 January.

In the best novel category, Andrea Levy’s Small Island came out top. It is the story of Jamaican immigrants to London in the late 1940s that won last year’s Orange Prize for Fiction. A strong shortlist of rivals included the latest novels by Kate Atkinson and Louis de Bernieres as well as Alan Hollinghurst’s Booker-winning The Line of Beauty.

Susan Fletcher’s coming-of-age work Eve Green beat the much-hyped Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell for the first novel award, and Geraldine McCaughrean’s Not the End of the World, a new take on the Noah’s Ark story, triumphed as best children’s book. The poetry award was won by Michael Symmons Roberts, a frequent librettist for the composer James MacMillan, for his fourth collection, Corpus.

Welcoming the news of his biography’s 5,000 prize, Prof Guy revealed that he has been made co-producer of a British independent feature film that will look at the last years of Mary’s life.