BP Portrait Award 2005

by Philip Hensher (Introduction)

The BP Portrait Award, now in its twenty-sixth year, is a popular fixture on the summer calendar, and is the leading showcase for young artists specializing in portraiture. The competition is open to artists from around the world and this year received a record-number of over 1000 entrants, all competing for the main prize of £25,000. As well as featuring all the entries from this year's competition, this arresting book includes a fascinating essay by Philip Hensher and portraits of people in the old Persian bazaar in Tehran by Darvish Fakhr, the BP travel-award winner 2004. Fakhr's paintings show the depths of emotion behind outwardly ritualised lives and aim to help us understand the common humanity that links the Western world and the Middle East. Philip Hensher's essay explores privacy and mystery in portraiture, focusing on the intimate relationship between painter and sitter. Hensher is the youngest writer in the Oxford Companion to English Literature and A.S. Byatt's Oxford Book of the English Short Story. He is a critic, journalist and writer of novels and short stories. His fiction includes The Mulberry Empire, The Bedroom of the Mister's Wife and Pleasured. Published to accompany the summer exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, London, from June 15 to September 25 2005; Sunderland Museum and Winter Gardens, from October 6 to November 27; and The Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh, from December 17 2005 to March 12 2006.

80 pages, Paperback

First published September 30, 2005

About the author

Hensher was born in South London, although he spent the majority of his childhood and adolescence in Sheffield, attending Tapton School.[2] He did his undergraduate degree at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford before attending Cambridge, where he was awarded a PhD for work on 18th century painting and satire. Early in his career he worked as a clerk in the House of Commons, from which he was fired over the content of an interview he gave to a gay magazine.[1] He has published a number of novels, is a regular contributor, columnist and book reviewer for newspapers and weeklies such as The Guardian, The Spectator , The Mail on Sunday and The Independent.
The Bedroom of the Mister’s Wife (1999) brings together 14 of his stories, including ‘Dead Languages’, which A. S. Byatt selected for her Oxford Book of English Short Stories (1998), making Hensher the youngest author included in the anthology.http://literature.britishcouncil.org/...
Since 2005 he has taught creative writing at the University of Exeter. He has edited new editions of numerous classic works of English Literature, such as those by Charles Dickens and Nancy Mitford, and Hensher served as a judge for the Booker Prize. From 2013 he will hold the post of Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University.[3]
Since 2000, Philip Hensher has been listed as one of the 100 most influential LGBT people in Britain,[4] and in 2003 as one of Granta's twenty Best of Young British Novelists.[1]
In 2008, Hensher's semi-autobiographical novel The Northern Clemency was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. In 2012, Hensher won first prize -German Travel Writers Award, and is shortlisted for the Green Carnation Prize. He also won the Stonewall Prize for the Journalist of the Year in 2007 and The Somerset Maugham Award for his novel Kitchen Venom in 1996. He wrote the libretto for Thomas Adès' 1995 opera Powder Her Face. This has been his only musical collaboration to date.
His early writings have been characterized as having an "ironic, knowing distance from their characters" and "icily precise skewerings of pretension and hypocrisy"[1] His historical novel The Mulberry Empire "echos with the rhythm and language of folk tales" while "play[ing] games" with narrative forms.[1]
He is married to Zaved Mahmood, a human rights lawyer at the United Nations.

You can find out more about Philip on his author page at 4th Estate Books: http://www.4thestate.co.uk/author/phi...