On Thursday 13th June 2024, Roy Foster, Chair of Judges, announced that MONET: THE RESTLESS VISION, published by Allen Lane, had won the ELHB 2024 Prize. Flora Fraser, Chair of the Prize, presented winning author Jackie Wullschläger with a cheque for £5,000 and a bound copy of Elizabeth Longford’s memoir, The Pebbled Shore. The Judges are all well-known historical biographers and historians. Antonia and Flora Fraser are also, respectively, daughter and granddaughter of Elizabeth Longford, the distinguished historical biographer and author of Victoria: RI, of Wellington: Years of the Sword and of Wellington: Pillar of State, who died at the age of 96 in 2002.

Roy Foster on Jackie Wullschläger’s winning biography, Monet: The Restless Vision (Allen Lane):
"The Judges cast a wide net for the 2024 Prize, choosing books which profiled various kinds
of transformative lives: people who crossed barriers to change history, often in ways no less
decisive for being discreet, whether they were philosophers, codebreakers, politicians or
diplomats. In the end we chose a masterly biography of an artist who transformed the way
we see things. Jackie Wullschläger’s life of Claude Monet is not only an enthralling portrait of
a powerful personality; she shows how the ‘restlessness’ pinpointed in her subtitle drove Monet
to reformulate memory and time in his great serial paintings. The process culminated with the
legendary water-lilies series, but Wullschläger’s deeply-researched book traces the development
of his vision back to its origins. She surveys and illuminates a complex and passionate personal
life, and the networks of friendship and affinity which connected him to the worlds of Clemenceau,
Bergson and Proust, as well as the fellowship of other Impressionists. Her biography not only
shows the development of a revolutionary artistic vision and the slow process of understanding
it; she sets the process against a brilliant evocation of the rich and multi-layered world of French
culture in the late nineteenth century and belle époque. Historically insightful, psychologically
perceptive, and consummately readable, Monet: The Restless Vision fulfilled everything the
Judges of the Elizabeth Longford Prize look for in ground-breaking historical biography."

Founded in 2003 by Flora Fraser and Peter Soros (Patron) to commemorate her late grandmother’s writing career,
the Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography rewards annually a historical biography which combines
scholarship and narrative drive. Previous winners include Anne Somerset’s Queen Anne, John Bew’s Citizen Clem:
A Biography of Attlee, Giles Tremlett’s Isabella of Castile: Europe’s First Great Queen and Ramachandra Guha’s
Rebels Against the Raj: Western Fighters for India’s Freedom.