AWARD: Lord Aberdare Literary Prize 2008

Lord Aberdare Literary Prize 2008

Each year the British Society of Sports History awards the Lord Aberdare Literary Prize for the best book in British sports history. The Society considers for the award monographs on topics in British sports history, or sports history monographs by authors based in Britain.

The judges for the prize for books published in 2008 had a large set of nominees from which to choose. What is more, the field was so strong that we felt we could announce a short list that highlighted the standout titles we considered. That short list (alphabetically) is:

Kasia Boddy Boxing: A Cultural History (Reaktion Books)
Tom Hunt Sport and Society in Victorian Ireland: the Case of Westmeath (Cork University Press)
Chick Korr & Marvin Close More Than Just a Game: Football v Apartheid (Harper Collins)
James F. Lee The Lady Footballers: Struggling to Play in Victorian England (Routledge)
Matthew Taylor The Association Game: A History of British Football (Longman)

The range of issues addressed in this selection, their ability to tell a much bigger story than a narrative of sport’s development and practice, their articulation to wider political and historiographical debates and issues, means that we are able to recommend each as important contributions not just to sports history, but to our understandings of the world around us.

Amid this strong field, however, one book stood out for each of us. This is not so much a cultural history, in the conventional senses of ideas and practices, of the quotidian bases of a sport, or of that sport's various zeitgeists, as a history of sports’ cultural representations. Kasia Boddy's grasp of the range of contexts within which boxing’s various representations were produced is impressive: although she is understandably stronger on USA contexts (her specialist area as a literature scholar), her grasp of contexts as diverse as ancient Greece and Regency England induces envy.

Boxing, like cricket, is one of the few sports that has attracted high culture, literary and artistic, representations and followers. Boddy traces and explores commonalities and differences in these from the ancient world through Georgian England to the US masculinists (Hemingway, London, and so on) and then on to more contemporary artists in film, journalism, letters, and fine arts. It is an impressive and weighty tome that deserves to be widely read, critiqued, revised, and revisited – we doubt that historians of boxing, and cultural historians of sport, as well as analysts of popular and many aspects of high culture will be able to by-pass it.

We are delighted to award the Lord Aberdare Literary Prize for 2008 to Kasia Boddy for Boxing: A Cultural History.

Malcolm MacLean
On behalf of the 2009 judges, Jason Wood, Dil Porter, and Malcolm MacLean