2025 SHORTLIST
Kathryn Hughes
Catland: Feline Enchantment and the Making of the Modern World
Some called it a craze. To others it was a cult.
Join prize-winning historian Kathryn Hughes to discover how Britain fell in love with cats and ushered in a new era. `He invented a whole cat world' declared H. G. Wells of Louis Wain, the Edwardian artist whose anthropomorphic kittens made him a household name. His drawings were irresistible but Catland was more than the creation of one eccentric imagination. It was an attitude - a way of being in society while discreetly refusing to follow its rules.
As cat capitalism boomed in the spectacular Edwardian age, prized animals changed hands for hundreds of pounds and a new industry sprung up to cater for their every need. Cats were no longer basement-dwelling pest-controllers, but stylish cultural subversives, more likely to flaunt a magnificent ruff and a pedigree from Persia. Wherever you found old conventions breaking down, there was a cat at the centre of the storm.
Whether they were flying aeroplanes, sipping champagne or arguing about politics, Wain's feline cast offered a sly take on the restless and risky culture of the post-Victorian world. No-one experienced these uncertainties more acutely than Wain himself, confined to a mental asylum while creating his most iconic work. Catland is a fascinating and fabulous unravelling of our obsession with cats, and the man dedicated to chronicling them.
Kathryn Hughes
Kathryn Hughes is a nonfiction writer, specialising in the nineteenth century. Her first book, which was based on her PhD, The Victorian Governess (Hambledon Continuum), explored the real lives of women who worked as residential teachers in middle- and upper-class homes. Her second book George Eliot: The Last Victorian (4th Estate), won the James Tait Black prize and was filmed by BBC2. Her biography of Isabella Beeton, The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton (4th Estate), won an Andre Simon prize and was longlisted for the Samuel Johnson prize. It was dramatised by BBC2. Her next book Victorians Undone: Tales of the flesh in the age of decorum set out to tell the biographies of famous Victorians through their body parts.For the past twenty years Kathryn Hughes has been a literary critic at the Guardian, specialising in nonfiction and history books. She also writes regularly for the New York Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement on culture, books and art. She has made and presented documentaries on Radio 4. For sixteen years Kathryn was Professor of Life Writing at the University of East Anglia where she convened the MA in Life Writing. She is a Fellow of both the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Historical Society.
