Anna Keay wins £5,000 Pol Roger Duff Cooper Prize for The Restless Republic

The Pol Roger Duff Cooper prize for the best work of non-fiction published in the UK in 2022 has been awarded to Anna Keay for The Restless Republic: Britain Without a Crown (William Collins).

Described by the judges as a “compelling and immensely readable” depiction of Britain’s national experiment with republicanism between 1649 and 1660, the book was said to breathe “life and light into a decade too often overlooked.”

The Pol Roger Duff Cooper Prize, supported by Pol Roger and run by the Duff Cooper Memorial Fund, a charity based at New College, Oxford, was first awarded in 1956, and has been given annually ever since. The judges this year were Artemis Cooper, Miles Young, warden of New College, Oxford, Mark Amory, Susan Brigden and David Horspool.

Keay receives £5,000, a Magnum of Pol Roger champagne and a copy of Old Men Forget, Duff Cooper’s autobiography.

Artemis Cooper, chair of the panel of judges, said: “Anna Keay writes with a clear grasp of the political conundrums of the times; what makes The Restless Republic so compelling are the stories of the men and women who lived through them. People like the agile turncoat Marchamont Nedham, editor of Mercurius Politicus, who created popular propaganda for the Commonwealth; or the formidable Countess of Derby, who held one of the last royalist redoubts in Isle of Man; or Gerrard Winstanley’s Levellers, who tried to grow food on common land in Weybridge and Cobham — an idea too radical to gain much support among the landowners of Surrey.

“Packed with entertaining and illuminating insights, this is an immensely readable book about a little-known period. I will never look at the interregnum in the same way again since learning that Christmas in Norfolk, with wine, mince-pies and music, was celebrated without fail, in spite of all the edicts from London.”

Anna Keay is a historian, writer and curator. She is currently director of the Landmark Trust, and previously worked in senior curatorial roles for English Heritage and Historic Royal Palaces.

Her books include The Magnificent Monarch and The Last Royal Rebel: The Life and Death of James Duke of Monmouth (Bloomsbury). A regular presenter on history and historic buildings on TV, she is a trustee of the Royal Collection Trust, a visiting professor at Birmingham City University and received an OBE in 2019 for services to history and heritage.