Lucy Hughes-Hallett is the author of The Pike: Gabriele d’Annunzio, which won the Baillie Gifford Prize, the Duff Cooper Prize, the Political Book Awards Political Biography of the Year and the Costa Biography Award and was chosen by The Sunday Times as the biography of the decade. Her novel Peculiar Ground was shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize and longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize. Her other books include Fabulous, a collection of short stories, and the cultural histories Cleopatra and Heroes: Saviours, Traitors and Supermen. She is a widely respected critic and was chair of the judges of the 2021 International Booker Prize.
Praise for The Pike: Gabriele d’Annunzio, Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War ‘Hard to beat … a biographical tour de force … a rich, voluptuous treat … a triumph, the biography of the year’ Robert McCrum, Observer, ‘Books of the Year’ ‘[The Pike] dramatically extends biography’s formal range to encompass a daunting theme’ TLS, ‘Books of the Year’ ‘This is a magnificent portrait of a preposterous character … deplorable, brilliant, ludicrous, tragic but above all irresistible, as hundreds of women could testify. His biographer has done him full justice’ Francis Wheen, Daily Mail ‘A cracker of a biography, an extraordinary story of literary accomplishment, passionate war-mongering and sexual incorrigibility… In less skilled hands this could have been a disaster; in fact it works wonderfully well’ Spectator, ‘Books of the Year’ ‘Beautiful, strange and original … an extraordinarily intimate portrait’ New Statesman ‘Hugely enjoyable … Hughes-Hallett has a great talent for encapsulating an era or an attitude …That almost 700 pages flew by bears testimony to how pleasurable and readable those pages were’ Sunday Times