Nicholas Mosley was the novelist son of the British fascist leader Oswald Mosley and stepson of Diana Mitford. He was a man, as the Booker Prize found out, who stuck to his guns.

Mosley, Third Baron Ravensdale, who died in 2017, won the Military Cross during the war and later wrote a highly critical account of his controversial father. Controversy was part of Nicholas Mosley’s relationship with the Booker Prize too. He was shortlisted for the first ever prize in 1969 with Impossible Object but caused a commotion in 1991 when he resigned from the judging panel in protest at his fellows’ refusal to put Allan Massie’s The Sins of the Fathers on the shortlist. For good measure, he complained that the other shortlisted books were light on ideas.  

Nicholas Mosley

All nominated books

Impossible Object