WHITBREAD BOOK AWARDS 2005
SHORTLISTS ANNOUNCED
· Record number of entries (476)
· Shortlists include three previous Whitbread Award winners
· First Novel Award category features a London waitress and Orange Award for New Writers winner, Diana Evans
· Former postman on Biography Award shortlist
· Poetry Award shortlist includes two debut collections
Whitbread today announces the shortlists for the Whitbread Book Awards 2005 in the Novel, First Novel, Biography, Poetry and Children’s Book Award categories.
The Awards recognise the most enjoyable books of last year by writers based in the UK and Ireland and were established by Whitbread, the UK’s leading hospitality business, in 1971.
This year the awards attracted 476 entries – the highest total ever - and included a record number of entries in the Biography and First Novel categories with 114 and 80 books submitted respectively. Each category’s shortlist was chosen by a panel of judges, who this year included writer and broadcaster John Humphrys; authors Philippa Gregory, Margaret Drabble and Linda Newbery; comedy writer and performer Arabella Weir and CBBC children’s presenter Lizo Mzimba.
Winners in the five categories, who each receive £5,000, will be announced on Wednesday 4th January 2006. The overall winner of the Whitbread Book of the Year will receive £25,000 and will be selected and announced at the Whitbread Book Awards ceremony in central London on Tuesday 24th January 2006.
Since the introduction of the Whitbread Book of the Year award in 1985, it has been won seven times by a novel, three times by a first novel, four times by a biography, five times by a collection of poetry and once by a children’s book.
The Whitbread Book Awards, in partnership with the National Reading Campaign, CILIP (Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals), amazon.co.uk and the Booksellers Association, continue to explore new ways of promoting the enjoyment of reading in the UK.
To be eligible for the 2005 Awards, books must have been first published in the UK or Ireland
between 1 November 2004 and 31 October 2005.
Full details of the shortlists follow. For additional information please visit www.whitbread-bookawards.co.uk.
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WHITBREAD BOOK AWARDS 2005 SHORTLISTS
2005 Whitbread Novel Award shortlist
Nick Hornby A Long Way Down Viking
Salman Rushdie Shalimar The Clown Jonathan Cape
Ali Smith the accidental Hamish Hamilton
Christopher Wilson The Ballad of Lee Cotton Little, Brown
2005 Whitbread First Novel Award shortlist
Tash Aw The Harmony Silk Factory Harper Perennial
Diana Evans 26a Chatto & Windus
Peter Hobbs The Short Day Dying Faber and Faber
Rachel Zadok Gem Squash Tokoloshe Pan Macmillan
2005 Whitbread Biography Award shortlist
Nigel Farndale Haw-Haw The Tragedy of William and Margaret Joyce Macmillan
Richard Mabey Nature Cure Chatto & Windus
Alexander Masters Stuart: A Life Backwards Fourth Estate
Hilary Spurling Matisse The Master Hamish Hamilton
2005 Whitbread Poetry Award shortlist
David Harsent Legion Faber and Faber
Christopher Logue Cold Calls Faber and Faber
Richard Price Lucky Day Carcanet
Jane Yeh Marabou Carcanet
2005 Whitbread Children’s Book Award shortlist
Frank Cottrell Boyce Framed Macmillan
Geraldine McCaughrean The White Darkness Oxford University Press
Hilary McKay Permanent Rose Hodder Headline
Kate Thompson The New Policeman The Bodley Head
Shortlist for the 2005 Whitbread Novel Award
(112 entries)
Judges
Alex Clark Freelance Journalist, Broadcaster and Critic
Philippa Gregory Author
John Humphrys Writer and Broadcaster
A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby (Viking)
It is New Year’s Eve at Toppers House North London. Disgraced television presenter Martin Sharp has scored 21/30 on the Aaron T Beck Suicide Intent Scale. He is fifteen floors up and prepared to end things. Told through the brilliantly drawn and distinctive voices of each of these characters, A Long Way Down is by turns hilarious, unsettling, moving and poignant. With true inventiveness and rich comedy, Hornby’s novel explores the darkest of subjects.
Nick Hornby was born in 1957, and is the author of three previous novels which have all gone on to be international bestsellers: High Fidelity, About a Boy and How To Be Good He is also the author of the memoir Fever Pitch, 31 Songs, Polysyllabic Spree and the editor of two anthologies, My Favourite Year and Speaking with the Angel. He lives in Highbury, North London.
Judges: “A warm, witty and compassionate novel which made us laugh out loud at the joy and folly of the human condition.”
Shalimar The Clown by Salman Rushdie (Jonathan Cape)
This is the story of Max, his killer, and his daughter – and of a fourth character, the woman who links them, whose story finally explains them all. It is an epic narrative that moves from California to Kashmir, France and England, and back to California again. Everything is unsettled. Everything is connected. Lives are uprooted, names keep changing – nothing is permanent. Spanning the globe and darting through history, Rushdie’s narrative captures the heart of the reader and the spirit of a troubled age.
Salman Rushdie was born in Bombay in 1947. He is the author of eight novels, one collection of short stories, and four works of non-fiction, and the co-editor of The Vintage Book of Indian Writing. In 1993 Midnight’s Children was judged to be the ‘Booker of Bookers’, the best novel to have won the Booker Prize in its first 25 years. The Moor’s Last Sigh won the Whitbread Novel Award in 1995, and the European Union’s Aristeion Prize for Literature in 1996. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres.
Judges: “Rushdie's panoramic imagination and great storytelling gifts sweep you away."
the accidental by Ali Smith (Hamish Hamilton)
the accidental, Ali Smith’s first full-length novel, is an outstanding portrayal of a 12–year-old girl. Astrid is spending the summer in a holiday home with her family in Norfolk. It’s a substandard house in a substandard town and she knows for sure nothing’s going to happen there all substandard summer. So she starts filming the dawn breaking each morning on her Sony digital camera. Essentially a modern-day reworking of Pasolini's 1968 film Theorem, this remarkable novel is at once dazzlingly bright and profoundly dark.
Ali Smith was born in Inverness in 1962 and lives in Cambridge. She is the author of Free Love, Like, Other Stories and Other Stories, Hotel World (shortlisted for both the Booker Prize and the Orange Prize in 2001) and The Whole Story and Other Stories. Ali Smith won The Arts Foundation 2001 Award for Short Story Writing and she reviews regularly for the Guardian, the Scotsman and the TLS.
Judges: “This extraordinary novel of family life combined humour, sadness and mystery with a wonderful linguistic playfulness and invention.”
The Ballad of Lee Cotton by Christopher Wilson (Little, Brown)
From his Icelandic father Lee Cotton gets his marble skin and blue eyes. From his mixed-race mother he gains his black identity. From his Mambo grandmother he inherits forebodings about his future. It's a combination that sets Lee apart from the other black kids growing up in Eureka, Mississippi. It marks Lee out as slightly odd. And very white. The Ballad of Lee Cotton is a brilliantly original, funny and profoundly thought-provoking novel about what it means to be human. It challenges the reader to dare to change, to look beyond the only thing that holds us back – the imaginary wreck of the future.
Christopher Wilson has been longlisted for The Booker Prize (Blueglass) and shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel Award (Mischief). He is a semiotician (advising companies on the language they use to advertise themselves) and completed a PHD on jokes at the LSE.
Judges: “This wonderful novel is wholly original, utterly riveting and full of surprises.”
Shortlist for the 2005 Whitbread First Novel Award
(80 entries)
Judges
Susanna Rustin Deputy Editor, Guardian Review
Robert Topping Topping & Company Booksellers
Arabella Weir Comedy Writer/Performer and Author
The Harmony Silk Factory by Tash Aw (Harper Perennial)
Set in Malaysia in the 1930’s and 40’s, with the rumbling of the Second World War in the background and the Japanese about to invade, The Harmony Silk Factory is the story of four people: Johnny, an infamous Chinaman whose shop house, The Harmony Silk Factory, he uses as a front for his illegal businesses; Snow Soong, the beautiful daughter of one of the Kinta Valley’s most prominent families; Kunichika, a Japanese officer who loves Snow; and an Englishman, Peter Wormwood, who went to Malaysia like many English but never came back, who also loves Snow to the end of his life. A journey the four of them take into the jungle has a devastating effect on all of them, and brilliantly exposes the cultural tensions of the era.
Tash Aw was born in Taipei and brought up in Malaysia. A recent graduate of the University of East Anglia, he now lives in London. Tash always wanted to be a writer and began his career writing short stories. Citing his influences as Flaubert, Faulkner and Nabokov, Tash is currently writing his second novel.
Judges: “A beautifully evocative, finely detailed novel written with surprising confidence and grace.”
26a by Diana Evans (Chatto & Windus)
Wickedly funny and devastatingly moving, 26a is an extraordinary first novel. Part fairytale, part nightmare, it moves from the mundane to the magical, the particular to the universal with exceptional flair and imagination. A story of twins whose inextricable connection brings both the joy of intimacy and the tragedy of separation, the novel draws on Diana Evans’ moving personal experience as a lone twin.
Diana Evans is a writer, critic and winner of the first Orange Award for New Writers. She was a dancer for several years, but chose to write full-time, graduating with an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. She has worked for Pride, the Evening Standard, and Marie Claire and writes regularly for the Independent and the Stage. She lives in West London.
Judges: “26a was selected from a handful of strong British-Nigerian entries for the polish of Diana Evans's prose. Her portrait of a north-west London family, and of the relationships between siblings and parents, is both funny and sad, and the secret world of twins Georgia and Bessi is brought wonderfully, imaginatively alive.”
The Short Day Dying by Peter Hobbs (Faber and Faber)
Evoking both the harsh realities and the beauty of rural life of the time, The Short Day Dying dramatises the struggle of an individual to find reason in mortality and the divine, and to determine his own place in the world. An extraordinarily accomplished debut, it also serves to introduce an important new voice – a stylist whose work is at once powerful, lyrical and intensely moving.
Peter Hobbs grew up in Cornwall and Yorkshire, and now lives in London. He never intended to be a writer and originally worked for the Foreign Office. However, after picking up an enduring illness whilst travelling, he found himself writing short stories during his lengthy recovery. A collection of stories will be published by Faber in 2006 and one of his stories was recently included in Picador’s recent New Writing 13 anthology.
Judges: “Peter Hobbs has written in The Short Day Dying, a novel of astonishing beauty and authenticity: “A year goes by in the life of a 19th century Methodist lay preacher”; and though not one of great outward moment, his growing spiritual doubts amidst his deep appreciation of natural beauty are finely and powerfully conveyed.”
Gem Squash Tokoloshe by Rachel Zadok (Pan Macmillan)
In lithe and imaginative prose, Zadok recreates the voice of a young girl growing up during the height of apartheid unrest in South Africa. As Faith struggles to make sense of the complex world in which she lives and come to terms with the beliefs that her society and upbringing have instilled in her, there emerges a richly compelling, emotionally resonant tale of courage set against the backdrop of a chaotically divided, beautiful country.
Rachel Zadok grew up in Johannesburg, South Africa where she studied Fine Art and worked as a freelance graphic designer. In 2004, she entered the first ever televised ‘How to Get Published’ competition on Channel 4’s Richard and Judy show and was selected as one of five shortlisted authors from 46,000 entries. Although she didn’t win, the standard of Rachel’s novel was so high that Pan Macmillan offered her a publishing contract anyway, along with a £20,000 advance. Rachel now lives in London where she works as a waitress, while pursuing a career as a writer.
Judges: “Gem Squash Tokoloshe impressed us with its powerful evocation of a child's-eye view of rural South Africa. Rachel Zadok sets the private drama of a collapsing household against the backdrop of a changing nation and creates a tangible atmosphere of menace.”
Shortlist for the 2005 Whitbread Biography Award
(114 entries)
Judges
Margaret Drabble Novelist and Biographer
Frances Wilson Biographer and Critic
Jon Woolcott Non-Fiction Buying Manager, Ottakar’s
Haw-Haw: The Tragedy of William and Margaret Joyce by Nigel Farndale
(Macmillan)
William and Margaret Joyce – Lord and Lady Haw-Haw – became one of the most ridiculed, feared and mythologised partnerships of the Second World War. Nigel Farndale’s compelling, evocative and sometimes shocking study of two people whose passions overrode everything, is an extraordinary book about an extraordinary marriage.
Nigel Farndale grew up in the Yorkshire Dales. He read philosophy as a postgraduate at Durham, has been a columnist and feature writer for the Sunday Telegraph since 1995, and has won a British Press Award for his interviews. He lives in London and is married with three children. This is his fourth book.
Judges: “This biography of William and Margaret Joyce is perfectly structured and enlightening, both in terms of understanding these charismatic and horribly flawed protagonists, and also in reaching much that is new about the war years in Germany and Joyce’s still controversial execution.”
Nature Cure by Richard Mabey (Chatto & Windus)
In the last year of the old millennium, the ground-breaking nature writer Richard Mabey fell into a severe depression. For two years he could neither work nor play and did little more than lie in bed with his face to the wall. Worst of all the natural world, once a source of joy and wonder, became meaningless for him. This remarkable book charts his gradual return to joyfulness.
Richard Mabey’s ground-breaking bestseller Flora Britannica won the British Book Awards Illustrated Book of the Year and the Botanical Society of the British Isles’ President’s Award, and was runner-up for the BP Natural World Book Prize. His previous books include Food for Free, The Unofficial Countryside and The Common Ground, as well as his intensely personal study of the nightingale Whistling in the Dark. His biography of Gilbert White won the 1986 Whitbread Biography Award .
Judges: “Mabey’s memoir on his recovery from crippling depression through a rediscovery of his love for nature is quite remarkable, both for its honesty and its total lack of ego. He has much to say on man’s relationship with nature and the prose is both warm and fiercely intelligent.”
Stuart: A Life Backwards by Alexander Masters (Fourth Estate)
Stuart Shorter’s brief life was one of turmoil and chaos. Scattered with glimpses of the author’s friendship with Stuart in the years before his death, Masters gives us Stuart’s life in reverse, tracing his route backwards through the Post Office heists and attempts at suicide and the spells inside many of this country’s prisons, back to a troubled time at school and learning difficulties and a violent childhood that acted like a springboard into the trouble that was to follow him all his life. Funny, despairing, uplifting, brilliantly-written, it is one of the most original biographies of recent years.
Alexander Masters was born in New York and brought up in Devon. He studied Physics and Mathematics at London and Cambridge before embarking on a varied career including working as a van driver, free magazine publisher, warehouse packer and postman. It was while he was working at Wintercomfort, the Cambridge day centre for the homeless, as a part-time fundraiser, that he became friends with Stuart Shorter and started work on his biography, Stuart:A Life Backwards, which would go on to win an Arts Council Writers Award in 2003.
Judges: “A brilliantly-crafted, endlessly funny and heartbreaking book on a vitally important subject. It is original, unputdownable and unforgettable.”
Matisse: The Master by Hilary Spurling (Hamish Hamilton)
Fifty years after his death, Matisse the Master shows us the painter as he saw himself. With unprecedented and unrestricted access to his voluminous family correspondence, and other new material in private archives, Hilary Spurling documents a lifetime of desperation and self-doubt, exacerbated by Matisse’s attempts to counteract the violence and disruption of the twentieth century in paintings that seem now effortlessly serene, radiant and stable.
Hilary Spurling is the author of The Unknown Matisse: The Early Years, 1869-1908. Her other biographies include Ivy: The Life of Ivy Compton-Burnett, Paul Scott: A Life, La Grande Thérèse: The Greatest Scandal of the Century and The Girl from The Fiction Department: A Portrait of Sonia Orwell. She is a regular book reviewer for The Daily Telegraph and New York Times.
Judges: “A ground-breaking biography full of human drama and artistic insight, with a great historical sweep.”
Shortlist for the 2005 Whitbread Poetry Award
(61 entries)
Judges
Ciaran Carson Professor of Poetry and Director of the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen’s University, Belfast
Suzie Dooré Senior Editor, Hodder and Stoughton
Robert Potts Critic and Literary Journalist
Legion by David Harsent (Faber and Faber)
The title sequence of David Harsent’s new collection is a gathering of reports from an unnamed war-zone: a series of discrete images, voices, events, and intermittent despatches – immediate and vivid – that come together to give witness to the experience and consequences of war and conflict. In its formal mastery of the poetic sequence, Legion is a distinguished successor to David Harsent’s previous collection, Marriage.
David Harsent was born in Devonshire. He has published eight collections of poetry; a Selected Poems appeared in 1989. His last collection, Marriage, was a Poetry Book Society Choice and won the the Forward Prize for Best Collection. His collaborations with the composer Harrison Birtwhistle have included a libretto, Gawain (Royal Opera House) and a song cycle, The Woman and the Hare (South Bank Centre and Carnegie Hall) and they are currently working together on a new full-length opera, The Minotaur, for the Royal Opera House. David is married to the actress Julia Watson.
Judges: "A book written in a language full of heft and edge, with a spine of Old English running through it, but still utterly up to date.”
Cold Calls by Christopher Logue (Faber and Faber)
This is the fifth and penultimate instalment of Christopher Logue’s celebrated account of the Iliad. Cold Calls continues from a point nine years after the Greeks have launched a thousand ships to capture Helen of Troy. The Trojans have driven the Greeks off the plain of Troy but the battles continue. Logue’s free blank verse elegantly transforms these well-loved, ancient stories into a modern epic.
Christopher Logue was born in 1926. He served as a private in the Black Watch and spent sixteen months in an army prison. His publications include several volumes of poetry and a pornographic novel. He lives in London with his wife, the critic Rosemary Hill.
Judges: “Cold Calls is Homer absorbed, rethought, and rewritten in an utterly contemporary language full of black humour and irony. It’s a compelling read.”
Lucky Day by Richard Price (Carcanet)
Richard Price’s long-awaited first collection combines wit, ingenuity and warmth in a series of deeply affecting poems. Dealing with a breathtaking range of subjects including love, the private lives of birds, and the author’s relationship with his daughter, the collection innovates without inhumanity yet never loses the essential clarity of expression that distinguishes true poetry.
Richard Price was born in 1966 and grew up in Scotland. He trained as a journalist at Napier College, Edinburgh, before studying English at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow. The youngest of the Informationist group of poets, he was a founder of the magazines associated with them, Gairfish and Southfields. He also co-founded Vennel Press, the imprint which brought many of the earlier Informationist collections to a wider audience. Richard Price is currently Head of Modern British Collections at the British Library, London.
Judges: “Price excels at domestic lyrics with a twist. He has a remarkable way with nervy hesitations of language, and the emotional weight of what is said, unsaid, and unsayable.”
Marabou by Jane Yeh (Carcanet)
In this her debut collection, Yeh illuminates the concept of personal identity with startling originality and freshness. These beautifully crafted poems explore love, lust, glamour and desperation with dazzling wit and flair. Marabou is a deeply moving meditation on the nature of artifice, and of the self.
Jane Yeh was born in the United States in 1971 and educated at Harvard University. Her poems have appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, Poetry Review, PN Review and Poetry (Chicago), and in the anthologies New Poetries III (Carcanet, 2002) and Poems, Poets, Poetry (St Martin's Press, 2002). Currently Writer in Residence at Kingston University, she contributes articles on books and sport to The Times Literary Supplement, Poetry Review, The Village Voice, and Time Out New York.
Judges: “It is hard to believe this is her first collection: technically agile, packed with sly humour and endlessly readable.”
Shortlist for the 2005 Whitbread Children’s Book Award (109 entries)
Judges
Lizo Mzimba CBBC Newsround Presenter
Linda Newbery Author
Professor Gervase Phinn Author and Lecturer
Una Haran (Young Judge) CBBC Newsround, ‘Presspacker’
Calum Finlayson (Young Judge) CBBC Newsround, ‘Presspacker’
Framed by Frank Cottrell Boyce (Macmillan)
Dylan Hughes is more interested in Ninja Turtles than in the Renaissance artists they are named after. Even when he discovers priceless artwork has been hidden in the unused slate mines of his tiny Welsh village, Dylan would still prefer a pizza-eating, party-loving mutant turtle to a painting.When his Dad leaves home, overnight nine-year old Dylan must become man of the household and boss of the family business.
Frank Cottrell Boyce, father of seven, is an established British screenwriter whose film credits include Welcome to Sarajevo, Hilary and Jackie and 24 Hour Party People. He now lives in Merseyside with his family. Frank’s first book, Millions, won the CILIP Carnegie Medal 2004 and has been shortlisted for a number of awards including the Guardian Children’s Fiction Award 2004. Millions has also been made into a movie directed by Danny Boyle, and was chosen as a Liverpool Reads which launched in September 2005.
Judges: “Set in a remote Welsh community, this is a warm-hearted story of family life, bursting with wit, charm and eccentricity.”
The White Darkness by Geraldine McCaughrean (Oxford University Press)
Captain Lawrence ‘Titus’ Oates, hero of the Antarctic, has been dead for nearly a century. But not in Sym’s head. In there, he is her constant companion, her soul mate, her advisor. It is as if he walked out of the Polar blizzard and into her mind. In fact, if it were not for him, life might be as bleak a place as the Antarctic wilderness. Then a short family expedition makes her ask the question she has long been avoiding: is it madness to stake your happiness on someone or something that isn’t there?
Geraldine McCaughrean was born and educated in Enfield, North London, the third and youngest child of a fireman and a teacher. She attended Christ Church College of Education but instead of teaching chose to work for a magazine publishing house. Since then, Geraldine has written over 130 books and plays for both adults and children and has won countless awards including three Whitbread Children’s Book Awards (1987, 1994 and 2004). Geraldine was recently chosen by the Special Trustees of Great Ormond Street Hospital to write the official sequel to Peter Pan which will be published by Oxford University Press in 2006.
Judges: "With its quirky, articulate narrator, and brilliantly evoked Antarctic setting, this unusual thriller is full of surprises.”
Permanent Rose by Hilary McKay (Hodder Headline)
Rose Casson is the kind of girl we should all want to be. Ferociously independent, intimidatingly bright and endlessly resourceful, Rose’s biggest problem is that people still see her as a kid, despite the fact she’s nearly nine. Permanent Rose is the third book about the amazing Casson family.
Hilary McKay has won the Whitbread Children’s Novel Award (2002), the Guardian Award and the Smarties Prize. Born and brought up in Boston, Lincolnshire, she read botany and zoology at St Andrews University, before switching to English, which inspired her to write. A former scientist, she now writes full-time. Hilary lives with her husband and two children, Bella and Jim, in north Derbyshire.
Judges: " A wonderfully funny tale of young Rose and her eccentric family, it manages to be both touching and entertaining as well as comic and quirky.”
The New Policeman by Kate Thompson (The Bodley Head)
Everyone in Kinvara is conscious that time is flying past, faster and faster – to such an extent that when JJ asks his mother what she would like for her birthday, she asks for more time. When he sets out to buy his mother some time, he discovers the fate of a flute which will provide some clues to his problems. JJ makes the transition to Tir na n’Og, the land of eternal youth, where he finds that the fairy people are also having a problem with time and it falls to his lot to locate the leak between the two parallel worlds.
Kate Thompson was born in Yorkshire in 1956. She has won the Bisto Book of the Year Award three times: for The Beguilers (2001), The Alchemist’s Apprentice (2002) and Annan Water (2005). She has trained racehorses in England and the USA, and travelled extensively in India, working and learning. Kinvara, a tiny village on the west coast of Ireland where Kate now lives, is the setting for The New Policeman, a book full of her passion for story and music. Kate recently completed an MA in Irish Traditional Music Performance at the University of Limerick.
Judges: "A fabulous mix of Irish music and magic, The New Policeman is an enchanting story of a fiddle-playing fifteen-year-old, a family secret and a lost flute. Kate Thompson’s engaging and amusing writing style keeps you turning page after page until its wonderful conclusion.”
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For further press information, author pictures and book jacket images, please contact Amanda Johnson on 0207 202 2837 or [email protected].
Notes for Editors:
1. The Whitbread Book Awards, which were established in 1971, aim to encourage, promote and celebrate the best contemporary British writing.
2. The total prize fund for the Whitbread Awards now stand at £50,000. The award winners from the five categories - Novel, First Novel, Biography, Poetry and Children’s Book - each receive £5,000.
3. The overall Whitbread Book of the Year is selected from the five category Award winners with the winner receiving a further £25,000. The winner will be announced at the awards ceremony at The Brewery, central London on January 24, 2006.
About Whitbread PLC:
Whitbread PLC is the UK's leading hospitality company, managing market leading businesses in the budget hotels, restaurant and health & fitness sectors, including Premier Travel Inn, Brewers Fayre, Beefeater, Costa, T.G.I. Friday's and David Lloyd Leisure, and a strategic investment in Pizza Hut (UK).
Whitbread's success is due to the skill and professionalism of its 50,000 people who serve around 10 million customers each month at more than 2,200 outlets across the UK. Whitbread's strategy is to create value for our shareholders by focusing investment and growing in expanding sectors of the hospitality industry, primarily in the UK but also in selected international markets.
In the financial year to March 3, 2005, Whitbread generated pre-tax, pre-exceptional profit of £263.5m on sales of more than £2,111m. Founded in 1742, the company is listed on the London Stock Exchange (as WTB.L) and is a member of the FTSE 100 and FTSE4Good indices.
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