Professor Diarmaid MacCulloch
Nationality: United Kingdom
Year: 1993
Subject Area: Arts and Humanities
The Wingate Trust gave me generous support during a freelance stage of my career in the early 1990s when I was writing a biography of Archbishop Thomas Cranmer. I could not have afforded to live and carry on my research and writing without it. This went on to win the Whitbread Biography Prize, the James Tait Black Prize and the Duff Cooper Prize. Partly on the strength of the book, I was appointed to a Lectureship at Oxford University with a Fellowship of St Cross College, and am currently Professor of the History of the Church in the University. I have subsequently written a prize-winning book on the whole European Reformation and am now, with even more hubris, writing a history of Christianity, which is twinned with my presentation of a six-part series on the same theme for BBC TV, which I will be presenting – scheduled for late 2009.