A biographer of English romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge has won Britain's richest literary prize.
Writer Richard Holmes was presented the 22,000-pound ($36,400) Whitbread Book of the Year award for his "Coleridge: Early Visions" at a celebrity dinner in London.The book won wide acclaim for its insight into the life of Coleridge, best known for the poems "Kubla Khan" and "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." Holmes has also written a biography of the poet Shelley.
The prize-winning book was selected from an initial field of more than 400 in five categories: biography, first novel, novel, children's novel and poetry.