The authors of a book chronicling the deaths of Northern Ireland's 30 years of violence were last night presented with the 16th annual Christopher Ewart-Biggs literary prize.
David McKittrick, Seamus Kelters, Brian Feeney and Chris Thornton were honoured for Lost Lives: the stories of the men, women and children who died as a result of the Northern Ireland troubles.
The £5,000 prize, which commemorates the British ambassador to Ireland assassinated in 1976, was presented by former Taoiseach Dr Garret FitzGerald at a reception in Dublin hosted by the current British ambassador, Sir Ivor Roberts.
Lost Lives details 3,637 deaths, from John Patrick Scullion, shot by the UVF in June 1966, to Charles Bennet, believed to have been killed by the IRA in July 1999. A spokesman for the judges, Prof Roy Foster, said it was "both an enduring memorial to all those who died - including Christopher Ewart-Biggs - and a dramatic enterprise of historical recovery".
A daughter of the murdered ambassador, Ms Kate Ewart-Biggs, was among the speakers at the presentation of the prize, established by her mother, the late Lady Jane Ewart-Biggs, to promote peace and reconciliation in Ireland and greater understanding between the peoples of Ireland and Britain.
This year's shortlist also included Marianne Elliott for The Catholics of Ulster: a history; Stephen Howe for Ireland and Empire: colonial legacies in Irish history and culture; Alvin Jackson for Ireland 1798-1998; Marc Mulholland for Northern Ireland at the Crossroads; and Adrian Rice for The Mason's Tongue.
Noting this was the 25th anniversary of Mr Ewart-Biggs's death, Prof Foster said the shortlist "was emblematic of the history of the last 25 years, sharply focusing on the price paid and the lessons learned". The choice "was a hard one", he added, but there could be "no more appropriate winner".
Mr McKittrick said he and his fellow authors were honoured to receive the prize "for a work which we hope shows the futility of violence and brings home the sheer waste and human cost of the Troubles".
Mr Ewart-Biggs and a civil servant, Ms Judith Cook, died on July 21st, 1976, when an IRA bomb exploded under their car near the ambassador's residence in south Dublin.
