The Evening Standard’s Norman Lebrecht has won the Whitbread Award for a First Novel. “Starting at 54, even with this groundwork established, is still kind of late. There are precedents – Annie Proulx, Penelope Fitzgerald and most famously Mary Wesley. But why, if Lebrecht is capable of writing such a good novel, did it not spring from him sooner? Simple, he says. He wasn’t ready…”