W. G. Grace: a life

Enjoying a celebrity shared by perhaps only Gladstone and Queen Victoria of his contemporaries, W.G. Grace was the world's first sporting superstar. Researched in archives from Grimsby to Australia, and drawing on diaries, letters, and access to the cricketer's own library, this biography offers a radical analysis of Grace's career. It also reviews the more controversial aspects of his conduct, including verbal and physical altercations both on and off the field, and his kidnapping of an Australian cricketer from Lord's. Discussion of his private life encompasses his childhood, his marriage, his children, his grief at the death of a daughter and later his eldest son, and his career as a doctor. The book includes an extensive statistical survey by Bill Frindall.

Simon Rae's award-winning W. G. Grace: A Life received widespread acclaim on its publication in 1998. He has also edited a number of anthologies, and for five years presented BBC Radio 4's 'Poetry Please!'. For nearly ten years he wrote regular topical poems for the Guardian and published two collections of them, Soft Targets and Rapid Response. He collaborated with Ronald Searle on a book of cartoons and poems, The Face of War, and in 1999 he won the National Poetry Prize. His first stage play, A Quiet Night In, was produced in Bristol and London the same year. In 1999/2000 he was poet in residence with Warwickshire County Cricket Club and MAC at Edgbaston, and he was Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Warwick University for 2000/2001.