Lucy Hughes-Hallett.
LUCY HUGHES-HALLETT
THE PIKE: GABRIELE D’ANNUNZIO, POET, SEDUCER & PREACHER OF wAR (2013)
Winner of the 2013 Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-fiction.
Winner of the 2013 Costa Book Awards Biography of the Year.
Winner of the Duff Cooper Prize.
Gabrieli D’Annunzio (born 1897) was an aristocratic journalist, poet and playwright. As a writer he came under the influence of Friedrich Niezsche, and was associated with the Decadent movement - as well as with symbolism and English aestheticism. During the First World War, in which Italy fought on the Allied side against Germany, D’Annunzio was transformed into a hero of the Itaian army and air force. He fought alongside the Italian army’s elite storm troops, and took part in the Flight over Vienna. Ths involved flying early biplanes on a 1200km round trip to Vienna to drop 50,000 poetic propaganda pamphlets, composed by D’Annunzio himself.
The Observer wrote of Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s biography: ‘Hard to beat … a biographical tour de force … a rich, voluptuous treat … a triumph, the biography of the year’. The New Statesman wrote: ‘Beautiful, strange and original … an extraordinarily intimate portrait’.
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Lucy Hughes-Hallett (born 1951) is a journalist, critic, and a respected author of both fiction and non-fiction books. At the age of 22 she was a winner of the Vogue Talent Contest, and was for five years a feature writer on Vogue. As a critic she has written for the Sunday Times and the Guardian, and was television critic of the Evening Standard for five years.
