Alexander Masters on Stuart Shorter

In Stuart: A Life Backwards, Alexander Masters revealed "in murder-mystery style what turned his friend – who didn’t live to see it published – from happy child to violent junkie". Stuart is a memoir of an unlikely friendship, between a student and a homeless man, which Minette Marrin in The Sunday Times said was "one of the most remarkable and touching biographies I’ve ever read." Illustrated by Alexander Masters, it won the Whitbread Book-of-the-Year Award in 2005 for biography, and the 2006 Hawthornden Prize. A television dramatisation was also made with the same name. Masters is currently finishing Monstrous Moonshine, a biography of Simon Philips Norton, one of the great prodigies of mathematics today.