Two tragic stories - one real, the other fictional - have put Oxford authors John Bayley and Barbara Trapido in the running for the £20,000 annual Whitbread Book of the Year prize, to be announced in January. REG LITTLE reports...

Few authors can have received as many prizes and accolades as Dame Iris Murdoch. Now the real-life story of the great novelist's battle with Alzheimer's disease could see her husband receiving a major literary award.

Professor John Bayley decided to write his account of life with Dame Iris to "cheer himself up".

But the harrowing account of how one of Oxford's greatest minds was slowly paralysed by Alzheimer's proved, in its way, just as powerful as anything written by his famous wife.

Prof Bayley, 73, who was Warton Professor of English at Oxford University, has been shortlisted for the 1998 Whitbread biography prize for Iris, A Memoir of Iris Murdoch (Duckworth Books, £16.95). Speaking from the couple's Charlbury Road home in north Oxford, where he looks after his 79-year-old wife, he said: "I am pleased and rather surprised because I did not think of it as a biography. It is very much a personal memoir and as such it doesn't really fall into any specific category.

"One of the reassuring and comforting things about writing the book has been the number of people in similar situations who have written letters to me. I wrote it to celebrate Iris and to cheer myself up and I'm pleased that it has had that effect on others."

He accepted many people felt he was wrong to give away intimate details about his marriage, with even his wife's pre-marital sex life discussed frankly. He also tells how his wife, whose intellect continues to mesmerise millions, is now reduced to watching Teletubbies each morning.

Prof Bayley said: "My wife has not been able to read my book, but she is able to say that the appearance of the book has pleased her." The fog of Alzheimer's began closing in around Booker Prize-winning Dame Iris several years ago. Now the phenomenal mind, which produced 27 remarkable novels and philosophical works, is barely capable of even the simplest sentences.

But Prof Bayley says his wife "almost miraculously" remains the woman he married, 45 years after he first saw her cycle past his window at St Antony's College.

He said: "Alzheimer sufferers are not always gentle, I know that. But Iris remains her old self in many ways. The power of concentration has gone, along with the ability to form coherent sentences and to remember where she is or has been."

A NOVEL LOOK AT ENGLISH SOCIETY

Novelist Barbara Trapido witnessed the tragedy of South Africa unfold at first hand.

She was there during the dark days of Mandela's arrest, with people disappearing and police banging on doors in the night. But it has been the subtleties of English society rather than the violence of Africa that has attracted her as a writer - and seen her shortlisted for the 1998 Whitbread novel award.

The death of a 17-year-old schoolgirl knocked down in London leads to a series of ghostly events in Barbara's fifth novel, The Travelling Hornplayer (Hamish Hamilton, £15.99). The dead girl's sister is haunted by her ghost as she is about to be interviewed in Oxford.

Yet for all its mix of tragedy, ghosts and adultery, critics hailed it as "funny, cunning and surprisingly sexy".

A former teacher, Barbara did not have her first novel published until the age of 40. She said: "Up until then I had only written stories for children of friends and to entertain myself when I was at home with two children." Her father taught Maths at Cape Town University and she well recalls grey monkeys descending nimbly to swipe bananas from picnic lunches. Barbara had a dog called Punch and her first attempt at writing was an elegy when he ate a budgie.

In her early 20s she left for England with her new husband Stanley, now a history don at Lincoln College, Oxford. But her memories of apartheid are vivid.

"I lived and breathed it all the time. That is why I wanted to leave - I thought of nothing else through secondary school."

She worked as a teacher at Hackney and then with young offenders at a remand centre in Durham before moving to Oxford 30 years ago.

Barbara, 57, of Southmoor Road, said: "It never crossed my mind to take up writing seriously. I suppose I was just too busy teaching and bringing up my two children."

Her first novel, Brother of the More Famous Jack, won a Whitbread prize in 1982. Worryingly for the opposition, her new book is seriously better.

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