How Edmund Richardson’s Alexander Turned Ancient History Into A £50,000 Literary Thriller (Picture Credit – David Parry via AP)
\n\n"No one called him Alexander the Great in his lifetime." Edmund Richardson said this on the evening of 4 November, after winning the £50,000 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction for 'Alexander: God, King, Man', published by Bloomsbury. He went further, describing his subject as his father's slightly disappointing son, even once he had the throne.
\n\nRichardson is a professor of classics at Durham, and he is the first author to take the prize for a book about ancient history in its thirty-year run. The panel's verdict explains much about why that happened now. Its chair, Kirsty Lang, said the book "reads like a novel", and the judges together called it "a love letter to the humanities and the work of historians and archaeologists". Those two phrases sit slightly awkwardly together, and the gap between them is where this story actually lives.
\n\nThe method behind the book is not novelistic in the least. Richardson spent roughly ten years on it, working with material from Central Asia, Egypt, Greece, India, Afghanistan, Babylon and Italy, and the book carries his own translations from sources…
Original source: https://www.timesnownews.com/lifestyle
