TAD art writer shortlisted for book award

One of theartsdesk's founder-writers, Mark Hudson, has been shortlisted in the biography category of the annual Spear’s Book Awards, for his book Titian, the Last Days. Hudson did not intend to write a conventional biography of the Venetian artist, but took Titian’s mysterious final paintings as its starting point – works so baffling in their subject matter and background that they involved him in far more factual research than he had originally anticipated when he began work in 2005.

"If you write about the art of the past, people assume you must be an art historian," says Hudson. "But an art-historical perspective is only one way of approaching art. I discovered Titian as an art student, drawing from his paintings in the National Gallery, and I learned about them from artists. Titian’s paintings are about atmosphere and emotion, which are the things that interest me most in art and literature. I wanted to take the reader, particularly the non-specialist reader, on a journey into those aspects of Titian’s paintings. I wanted it to be a book that anyone could pick up and read."

Three extracts from Titian: the Last Days and an gallery of nine Titian masterpieces can be found on theartsdesk:

• Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne: a young man's masterpieces
• Titian in Love: the painter's emotional life
• Titian in Old Age: the darker pictures
• Gallery (courtesy the National Gallery, the Louvre, the Prado, Washington National Gallery and Capodimonte Museum, Naples

The Spear’s Book Awards, presented in association with Citi Private Bank, will be made on Monday at The Criterion, Piccadilly. The other short-listed biographies are Selina Hastings’ The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham, Michael Scammell’s Koestler: The Indispensable Intellectual, Robert Service’s Trotsky: A Biography and Ion Trewin’s Alan Clark: The Biography.

Further awards will be handed for the year’s best Financial History, Financial Book, Family and Social Histories, Illustrated Book, Novel of Year (with Martin Amis, Robert Harris, Jon McGregor, David Mitchell, Alex Preston and William Trevor in contention), and special awards for Best First Book, Outstanding Body of Work, and an Outstandingly Produced work.

Mark Hudson’s first book, Our Grandmothers’ Drums’ won the Somerset Maugham and Thomas Cook awards, while his second, Coming Back Brockens, won the NCR Award for the best non-fiction book of the year.

• Titian, the Last Days is published by Bloomsbury
• The full shortlist of the Spear's Book Awards can be found here