An Overview
After Duff Cooper's death in 1954, a group of his friends decided to establish a trust to endow a literary prize in his memory. The trust appoints five judges. Two of them are ex-officio: the Warden of New College, Oxford, and a member of Duff Cooper's family (initially, Duff Cooper's son, John Julius Norwich for the first thirty-six years, and then his daughter, Artemis Cooper). The other three judges appointed by the trust serve for five years and they appoint their own successors. The first three judges were Maurice Bowra, Cyril Connolly and Raymond Mortimer. At present, the three serving judges are the historian and biographer Lucy Hughes Hallett, the biographer and novelist Jonathan Keates, and the lawyer Dr. Frank Callanan. The fifty-third Duff Cooper Prize was awarded to Martin J. Sherwin and Kai Bird for their work, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer on February 19, 2009.
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