I have never won an award. This may well be because there are no awards in existence for which I am eligible. I am yet, for example, to hear about an award for “the woman with the highest body mass index to make a first solo flight in 2008” or some such.
But I am keen on awards. They serve to not only honour the winner, but encourager les autres. One of the toughest awards to win is Journalist of the Year, because it is decided by a jury of journalists. This is why it was very pleasing that my colleague Gillian Tett was named “Journalist of the Year 2009” in March. The judges' citation declared that she had been “consistently in front of the curve as the world's economy went into meltdown”.
It was a timely reminder to the outside world that the Financial Times is not staffed solely with white, male, Anglo-Saxon alumni of Balliol College, Oxford, but has some female talent as well. And it was encouraging for the Financial Times and the people who work there. Tett doesn't let the grass grow under her feet. A working mother, she has not only produced award-winning commentary on the crisis but has also written a book about the events that led to the world's credit markets seizing up. Fool's Gold – a second extract of which starts on page 20 – is a worthy successor to her earlier book, Saving the Sun, and written in the style of one of my favourite books ever, Bryan Burrough's Barbarians at the Gate. By the time you get to the end of Fool's Gold you will think that you really know Blythe Masters (one of its protagonists).