Chris Leadbeater

Chris Leadbeater not only conveys a sense of place; he conjures an atmosphere. The reopening of the Old War Office (as a luxury hotel) in London’s Whitehall offered a chance to explore. “Is that a spectral cloud of cigar smoke you smell as you reach the first floor?” asks Leadbeater. “It could be: Winston Churchill strode this way on many a morning, bound for his office and the weighty matters of war and peace.”

A foray into the woods of rural Smaland, lured by the Swedish tourist authority’s cunning marketing campaign based on its rich supernatural folklore, produced a feature that was as unnerving as it was informative. “I am woken some time around 3am by a noise overhead,” it begins. “In my scarcely lucid state, it suggests the scratch of nails across the window.”

In the bay off Alexandria, equipped with oxygen mask and tank, he sinks through sea “the green of pea soup and wet school-dinner cabbage” into the first century BC in search of Cleopatra’s final resting place. Each feature is entertaining, informative and erudite, and Leadbeater sweeps the reader along effortlessly in a voyage of discovery. The judges praised his “beautiful, expansive writing” and “enjoyable, inventive observations.”