The Franco-British Society Literary Award, formerly The Enid McLeod Literary Award, is presented annually to the author of a work published in the UK which is considered to have contributed most to Franco-British understanding.

​The panel of distinguished judges award a cheque to the winning author, who is usually invited to give the members a talk about their book. 
Eligible books
  • Any full-length work of literature written in English by a citizen of the United Kingdom, the British Commonwealth or the Irish Republic and first published in the United Kingdom is eligible.
  • A book submitted on behalf of an author who was deceased at the time of publication will not be considered.
  • No English translation of a book written in any other language will be considered.
  • No entry shall be ineligible because its author has previously won this or any other prize.

Book entry
Any United Kingdom publisher may enter one or more suitable books published between 1 January and 31 December of the relevant year but the judges would welcome receiving entries as soon as they are available.

The Award
  • The award will consist of a cheque for £100.
  • It will be presented annually to the author of the work of literature published in the United Kingdom which, in the opinion of the judges, best reflects the aims and interests of the Society in maintaining and enhancing the cultural and educational links between the UK and France.
  • Only in exceptional circumstances will the award be split between two authors.
  • It is customary for the award-winner to be invited to give a talk about their book to members of the Society.
  • The judges are chosen by the Council of the Franco-British Society, and the award will be announced in the first three months of the year.
The judges
Munro Price, Professor of Modern European History, University of Bradford

Munro Price is Emeritus Professor of Modern European History at Bradford University, and a former winner of the Literary Prize. He works on modern France, specializing in the French Revolution, and his books include The Fall of the French Monarchy (2002), The Perilous Crown: France Between Revolutions (2007) and Napoleon: the End of Glory (2014). He is currently working on a comparative study of the French Revolution.

Richard Vinen, Professor of History, King's College London 

​Dr Cynthia Gamble, Honorary Research Fellow, University of Exeter
Dr Cynthia Gamble, a graduate of the Université de Grenoble and London University, is Honorary Research Fellow, University of Exeter. 

Cynthia finds inspiration in working with two languages and cultures, and writes and lectures extensively on Marcel Proust, John Ruskin, the Belle Epoque, and related areas. She is the author of several books including Voix entrelacées de Proust et de Ruskin (2021), and co-author of Ruskin, Proust et la Normandie : aux sources de la Recherche (2022). 

In 2021, she was elected Membre de l'Académie des Sciences, Belles-Lettres et Arts de Rouen. 
We are pleased to announce the winner of the Franco-British Society Literary Award 2024: Sue Prideaux for her book “Wild thing: a life of Paul Gauguin". Sue Prideaux will be awarded in the course of 2025. 
'You wish to teach me what is within myself: learn first what is within you . . . I believe life has no meaning unless one lives it with a will, at least to the limit of one's will.'

Paul Gauguin is chiefly known as the giant of post-Impressionist painting whose bold colours and compositions rocked the Western art world. It is less well known that he was a stockbroker in Paris and that after the 1882 financial crash he struggled to sustain his artistry, and worked as a tarpaulin salesman in Copenhagen, a canal digger in Panama City, and a journalist exposing the injustices of French colonial rule in Tahiti.

In Wild Thing, the award-winning biographer Sue Prideaux re-examines the adventurous and complicated life of the artist. She illuminates the people, places and ideas that shaped his vision: his privileged upbringing in Peru and rebellious youth in France; the galvanising energy of the Paris art scene; meeting Mette, the woman who he would marry; formative encounters with Vincent van Gogh and August Strindberg; and the ceaseless draw of French Polynesia.

Prideaux conjures Gauguin's visual exuberance, his creative epiphanies, his fierce words and his flaws with acuity and sensitivity. Drawing from a wealth of new material and access to the artist's family, this myth-busting work invites us to see Gauguin anew.
Sue Prideaux is Anglo-Norwegian.  Her first biography Edvard Munch: Behind the Scream (Yale University Press) won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and she has spoken on Munch for the World Monuments Fund, at literary festivals, at the Royal Academy in London and at MOMA in New York for CBS television, and for Korean TV.  She has written on Munch for the Royal Academy, Sotheby’s, the Art Newspaper and other publications.

While writing about Munch, Sue became increasingly fascinated by his friend August Strindberg. Strindberg: A Life was published by Yale in March 2012. It was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson prize for nonfiction and won the Duff Cooper prize.

​https://www.sueprideaux.com/

The judges of the 2023 Franco-British Society Literary Award chose as joint prize winners : Jonathan Sumption for his book “The Hundred Years War: Volume V: Triumph and illusion” and Jackie Wullschlageras for “Monet: the restless vision”. Both authors were awarded on 5th February 2025 at King’s College London. Information about the event and author biographies are available HERE  
Monet: the restless vision by Jackie Wullschläger
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​In the course of a long and exceptionally creative life, Claude Monet revolutionized painting and made some of the most iconic images in western art. Misunderstood and mocked at the beginning of his career, he risked everything to pursue his original vision. Although close to starvation when he invented impressionism on the banks of the Seine in the 1860s-70s, in the following decades he emerged as the powerful leader of the new painting in Paris at one of its most exciting cultural moments. His symphonic series Haystacks, Poplars, and Rouen Cathedral brought wealth and renown. Then he withdrew to paint only the pond in his garden. The late Water Lilies, ignored during his lifetime, are now celebrated as pioneers of twentieth century modernism.
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Behind this great and famous artist is a volatile, voracious, nervous yet reckless man, largely unknown. Jackie Wullschläger's enthralling biography, based on thousands of never-before translated letters and unpublished sources, is the first account of Monet's turbulent private life and how it determined his expressive, sensuous, sensational painting. He was as obsessional in his love affairs as in his love of nature, and changed his art decisively three times when the woman at the centre of his life changed. Enduring devastating bereavements, he pushed the frontier of painting inward, to evoke memory and the passing of time. 
The Hundred Years War: Volume V: Triumph and illusion by Jonathan Sumption 
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​In this final volume of his epic history of the Hundred Years War, Jonathan Sumption tells the story of the collapse of the English dream of conquest, from the opening years of the reign of Henry VI until the loss of all of England's continental dominions except Calais thirty years later. This sudden reversal of fortune was a seminal event in the history of the two principal nation-states of western Europe, ending four centuries of the English dynasty's presence in France and separating two countries whose fortunes had once been closely intertwined, creating a new sense of national identity in both. The legacy of these events would influence their divergent fortunes for centuries to come. Behind the clash of arms stood some of the most remarkable personalities of the age: the Duke of Bedford, the English Regent who ruled much of France; Charles VII of France, who patiently rebuilt his kingdom after the disasters of his early years; the captains populating the pages of Shakespeare - Fastolf, Montagu, Talbot, Dunois and, above all, the extraordinary figure of Joan of Arc who changed the course of the war in a few weeks at the age of seventeen.
CANDIDATES 2023
The judges of the 2022 Franco-British Society Literary Award chose as the prize winner Napoleon at peace: how to end a revolution, by William Doyle. (Reaktion Books. 231 pp. £15.99. ISBN 9781789146172).
 
A history of how Napoleon ended the Revolutionary period in France, covering the period in 1802-1803 when he ended the republican polity the Revolution had brought and established himself as a monarch in all but name, brought the Revolutionary wars with the great powers of Europe to a peace advantageous to France, and reconciled France with the papacy.

​The attempts to recover France’s lost Caribbean empire, however, were a failure, and the fragile peace with the other great powers (including Great Britain) and the papacy soon broke down; the Revolutionary Wars became the Napoleonic Wars.
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This book covers specifically the only period of Napoleon’s career when he was not at war, a period usually just covered as an interlude in more general studies of his life.

William Doyle was awarded Literary Prize winner 2022 by Arts Minister Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay, on 13th July at the House of Lords

Information about the event is available HERE. 

Wiliam Doyle was born in Yorkshire (1942) and studied Modern History at Oriel College, Oxford. He went on to take a doctorate for a thesis on eighteenth century Bordeaux. He taught for fourteen years at the University of York before becoming Professor of Modern History at the University of Nottingham  in 1981. Five years later he moved to a chair at the University of Bristol, where he remained until retirement in 2008. He has also held a number of visiting appointments in France and the USA. Before Napoleon at Peace he had written seventeen books, mostly on French history, the best known being The Oxford History of the French Revolution (1989, 3rd edn.2018). Elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1998, he is also a corresponding member of the Academies of Bordeaux and Besancon, was one of the founders of the Society for the Study of French History, and is a Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Palmes academiques. He lives in Bath.
CANDIDATES 2022
The judges of the 2021 Franco-British Society Literary Award chose as one of the two prize winners To kidnap a Pope: Napoleon and Pius VII, by Ambrogio A. Caiani

In the wake of the French Revolution, Napoleon Bonaparte, First Consul of France, and Pope Pius VII shared a common goal: to reconcile the church with the state. But while they were able to work together initially, formalizing an agreement in 1801, relations between them rapidly deteriorated. In 1809, Napoleon ordered the Pope’s arrest.

Ambrogio Caiani provides a pioneering account of the tempestuous relationship between the emperor and his most unyielding opponent. Drawing on original findings in the Vatican and other European archives, Caiani uncovers the nature of Catholic resistance against Napoleon’s empire; charts Napoleon’s approach to Papal power; and reveals how
the Emperor attempted to subjugate the church to his vision of modernity. Gripping and vivid, this book shows the struggle
for supremacy between two great individuals—and sheds new light on the conflict that would shape relations between the Catholic church and the modern state for centuries to come.
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Ambrogio A. Caiani was awarded one of the Literary Prize winners 2021 by The Rt Hon Dominic Grieve KC, President of the Franco-British Society, on 30th November at the House of Lords

Information about the event is available HERE. 

Ambrogio received his PhD from Sidney Sussex College, University of Cambridge in 2009. Since then he has taught at the universities of Greenwich, York and Oxford, and is currently Senior Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of Kent. Ambrogio's main research interests are Revolutionary France and Napoleonic Italy and his work has been published in several leading academic journals. He the author of, To Kidnap a Pope: Napoleon and Pius VII 1800–1815 published in 2021 by Yale University Press and of Louis XVI and the French Revolution 1789-1792 published by Cambridge University Press in 2012. His most recent book is Losing a Kingdom, Gaining the World; The Catholic Church in the Age of Revolution and Democracy which was released by Head Zeus on 12 October 2023.
CANDIDATES 2021
FBS LITERARY AWARD WINNERS - 1982-2022

Award winners 2021

To kidnap a Pope: Napoleon and Pius VII, by Ambrogio A. Caiani (Yale University Press) - Was awarded on 1st November 2023 at the House of Lords. Information available HERE. 

The fall of Robespierre: 24 hours in Revolutionary Paris, by Colin Jones (Oxford University Press)

Award winner 2020

Art is a tyrant: the unconventional life of Rosa Bonheur, by Catherine Hewitt (Icon Books)

Award winner 2019 

King of the world: a life of Louis XIV, by Philip Mansel (Allen Lane)