The William Hill Sports Book of the Year is a prestigious award with a £30,000 prize to the winner and a place alongside some of the greatest ever sports books.
In the third of a short series looking at this year’s nominees leading up to the announcement of the winner next week, today we look at Conor Niland’s memoir The Racket.
Former professional tennis player and Irish number one Niland from Limerick is the only Irish writer to feature on the shortlist and he also flies the flag for the sport of tennis in this brutally honest account of his career.
“Match-fixing and doping are two things that are prevalent in all sports, not least tennis, but you’re not going to hear about those in the autobiographies of the very best players, so this was an opportunity to address those things,” he said.
“The Racket is a book about professional tennis from the perspective of someone knocking on the door of the top 100 just outside of the ‘big time’. This is about what life on the Tour is like at the lower rungs and I hope to inform and entertain the readers with my story.”
“I spent eight years on the Tour and saw a lot of things. With my English degree from Berkeley, I always thought I’d be able to give an interesting perspective on that world and a few people had told me I had an interesting story.”
“During Covid in 2020, I just started to write, and a sentence became a paragraph which became a bunch of notes, then we had a book on our hands after three or four years in the making.”
“The unusual thing with tennis is that you don’t know when you’re going to play a lot of the time when you’re not one of the big players. I always felt like it was really important to be honest about things like this, I wanted to show what the Tour was really like. If something happened, I was always going to talk about it; everything needed to be on the table.”
“To be shortlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award for The Racket is amazing,” said Niland. “When I heard I was longlisted I was delighted, and to get shortlisted among such incredible company is a real honour. “
“This has always been an award I’ve looked out for as a reader, wherever you see that William Hill logo on the book, you know you’re in good hands. So to join that club, regardless of what happens on the night, is amazing.”
“The reaction has been really positive to the book, I’ve had virtually no negative reaction at all. I was very honest in the book, and I wasn’t sure how that was going to be taken by the audience but former professionals have reached out and thought I’d spoken a lot of truth.”
“That was hugely gratifying as there was a few sleepless nights before we released the book on how it was going to be received.”
The William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award 2024 winner will be decided by the six-person judging panel of Alyson Rudd, Clarke Carlisle, Gabby Logan, Dame Heather Rabbatts, Mark Lawson and Michelle Walder and announced at the awards ceremony in central London on Tuesday 19th November, with the prestigious trophy and £30,000 presented to the victorious author.
Find out more about the award.
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These Heavy Black Bones by Rebecca Achieng Ajulu-Bushell tells the story of how she became the first Black woman to swim for Great Britain – and speaking to William Hill ahead of the award ceremony on November 19th, the two-time national champion said: “It’s a coming-of-age story. It’s about my journey through elite sport as a professional swimmer from learning to swim in Kenya having not seen a 50m pool let alone an indoor pool, to coming to the UK and becoming British champion twice.”
“The book deals with race and racism, the institutions and how they shape us but overall, it’s about my relationship with pain and perfection and the sacrifices that I made to become the best.”
“There are occasions where I bring the reader into my body to swim with me but others where I’m honest and share things that are fundamentally quite painful. It wasn’t hard to do, though, it took a really clinical surgery in pulling myself apart and I wanted to share my truths to find the peace that has to come through above all in writing – it was a necessary part of the process.”
“I go back to my process of writing this book, it’s a strange piece of work that’s difficult to position. It’s literary, it’s a memoir as well as a sports book, so it was really difficult when going out to publishers to explain what it was and what it means.
“We wondered how it would find its audience, so that fact that it has made it onto the shortlist for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award is insane – to win it would be a huge honour.”
“Memoirs are really tricky to write, though. Not only are you writing your own story but invariably the stories of others are being put on the page as well. Figuring out how much to bring my family into the book and my relationship with my mother was really hard. I knew it would reveal things about her which maybe weren’t my place to say but the story had to come together around that. It was hard to find the line and how to tread around it carefully.”
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Munichs chronicles the history of the Red Devils in the months following the 1958 Munich air crash, and the people who helped rebuild the club in the aftermath of the disaster.
“One thing that struck me particularly when writing this novel was that the assistant manager to Matt Busby at Manchester United at the time, Jimmy Murphy, had to bring back the survivors to Manchester and get the team playing again,” said Award-winning writer Peace, whose previous work includes The Damned Utd.
“Not only did he get them playing again, but he also got them to the final of the FA Cup that May.”
“I really hadn’t appreciated what he had done with the team he had left around him; he was the driving force in getting them back on track. I struggle to see how Manchester United would be where they are now had Jimmy Murphy been on that plane.”
Peace has been overwhelmed by the positive response to his book and happy to shine a light on the heroes who helped get Manchester United back on its feet.
“What I wanted to do with this book was to write it for my late father who passed in 2022 as the vast majority of conversations we would have together were about sport, mainly football.”
“The book began as a way for me to keep the conversation with my father going after he passed away. I realised while writing the book that there was a lot about the Munich disaster that I didn’t know and I also felt that beyond dealing with my own grief, I thought that it was a story that not only Manchester United fans, but anyone who had a real interest in football, needed to know more about.”
“I was shocked and surprised to be longlisted – pleasantly shocked and surprised I must add – even more so when I found out I’d made the shortlist! It’s been a pleasant surprise to see the book get where it has in the competition already. I’m also aware I’m among some other great books and authors, it’s a real honour.”
“It would be a tremendous honour to win, it really would be.”
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