The judges state:
The photographer and the writer have a shared purpose to track down the elusive Robyn Hyde. Elusive not because she was in hiding, to the contrary she was in the thick of it; war, illness, romantic disappointment, the sexist politics of the time, all had their impact. She was elusive because her unsettled and brief life left many fragments, the patterns of her domestic life were unconventional, more a yearning than an anchor.
Morris and Sameshima knit together the evidence from the places she inhabited, from her writings, and those of the people around her. They search, sometimes together and sometimes in parallel, under the shadow of a pandemic crisis. Their own discombobulating time interwoven with hers. Past and present sometimes combining in moments of elucidation as when they visit the attic room in the Grey Lodge, a place of psychiatric lockdown, where for almost four years she wrote prolifically and found some sort of sanctuary.
This is an empathic and tactile book which tells the story of an artist whose work still resonates.
Read the full list here.
