Duncan Hamilton (journalist)

Duncan Hamilton (born December 1958) is a British author and newspaper journalist and three-time winner of the prestigious William Hill Sports Book of the Year award.

Life and career

Hamilton was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and his family moved to Nottinghamshire when he was four.[1]

Hamilton won the first William Hill Sports Book Award with the 2007 memoir Provided You Don't Kiss Me: 20 Years With Brian Clough,[2] an account of his time at the Nottingham Evening Post where he worked for more than 20 years.[3][4] The book also won the 'Best Football Book' category of the 2008 British Sports Book Awards.[5]

He was the paper's Nottingham Forest reporter during the club's glory years and covered both of Forest's historic victorious European Cup campaigns (1979 and 1980) for the newspaper. During his time covering Forest, Hamilton developed a close, if at times testy, relationship with the club's famously outspoken manager, Brian Clough.

In Provided You Don't Kiss Me, Hamilton claims he bonded with Clough after the manager learned he, like Clough, was from the north-east of England. He provides an eyewitness account of the relationship between Clough and his assistant, Peter Taylor, and charts Clough's demise and descent into alcoholism.

FHM called the book a "superb portrait of the conflicted, contradictory man [that] doesn't duck his uglier aspects."[6] It quickly became a bestseller and won the William Hill award against very strong competition.[7] After winning the £18,000 first prize, Hamilton wrote a column for the Yorkshire Post, where he was a deputy editor, expressing his surprise and delight at the book's success.

In 2009, Hamilton won a second William Hill Sports Book of the Year award for his work on cricketer Harold Larwood;[8][9] a biography of the outstanding fast bowler Harold Larwood, who was a protagonist in the controversial 'Bodyline' series between Australia and England in 1932-33. The book also won the 'Best Biography' category of the 2010 British Sports Book Awards[10] and was named the Wisden Book of the Year. In 2019 he won his third William Hill award for The Great Romantic: Cricket and the Golden Age of Neville Cardus.[11]

After 32 years as a newspaper journalist in Nottingham and Leeds, Hamilton now writes freelance, working mostly on his books. He and his wife Mandy live in the village of Menston in West Yorkshire.[1]

Books
  • Nottingham Forest FC: Thirty Great Years in Photographs, 1988 ISBN 9780948946363
  • Provided You Don't Kiss Me: 20 Years with Brian Clough, 2007 ISBN 9780007247103
  • Sweet Summers: The Classic Cricket Writing of JM Kilburn, 2008 ISBN 9781905080465 (edited)
  • Fire and Ashes, 2009 ISBN 1848416520
  • Harold Larwood, 2009 ISBN 9781847249494
  • Old Big 'ead: The Wit and Wisdom of Brian Clough, 2009 ISBN 9781845134761 (edited)
  • A Last English Summer, 2010 ISBN 9781849160933
  • The Unreliable Life of Harry the Valet: The Great Victorian Jewel Thief, 2011 ISBN 9781407475578
  • Wisden on Yorkshire: An Anthology, 2011 ISBN 9781408170397 (edited)
  • The Footballer Who Could Fly: Living in My Father's Black and White World, 2012 ISBN 9781846059803
  • Immortal: The Biography of George Best, 2013 ISBN 9781846059810
  • For the Glory: The Life of Eric Liddell, 2016 ISBN 9781473508897
  • A Clear Blue Sky, 2017 ISBN 9780008232672 (with Jonny Bairstow)
  • The Kings of Summer: How Cricket's 2016 County Championship Came down to the Very Last Match of the Season, 2017 ISBN 9780993291128
  • Going to the Match: The Passion for Football, 2019 ISBN 9781473661783
  • The Great Romantic: Cricket and the Golden Age of Neville Cardus, 2019 ISBN 9781473661837

References
  1. Greenhalf, Jim (24 August 2009). "Author spurred by sporting lives". Telegraph & Argus. Retrieved 23 July 2018.
  2. Duncan Hamilton, Provided You Don't Kiss Me: 20 Years With Brian Clough, Fourth Estate/Harper Collins, London, 2007
  3. Simon Redfern (9 December 2007). "Provided You Don't Kiss Me, by Duncan Hamilton". The Independent. Retrieved 26 November 2012.
  4. John Dugdale (28 November 2007). "The week in books". The Guardian. Retrieved 26 November 2012.
  5. "Previous winners". British Sports Book Awards. Retrieved 29 March 2020.
  6. As quoted in the book's review on Amazon.co.uk
  7. William Hill Sports Book of the Year website
  8. Andrew Baker (26 November 2009). "Duncan Hamilton wins William Hill Book of the Year Award for Harold Larwood biography". The Daily Telegraph. Retrieved 26 November 2012.
  9. Staff writer (26 November 2009). "Harold Larwood biography wins William Hill prize for Hamilton". The Guardian. Retrieved 26 November 2012.
  10. Simon Briggs (12 March 2010). "'Harold Larwood' wins Best Biography at British Sports Book Awards". The Daily Telegraph. Retrieved 26 November 2012.
  11. Briggs, Simon (6 December 2019). "Neville Cardus's spirit oversees Duncan Hamilton's third William Hill Sports Book of the Year". Daily Telegraph. Retrieved 8 December 2019.
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