Costa Winner: Put ting Dad back together

When her father was 86, Keggie Carew found a note in his pocket reading: "My name is Tom Carew, but I have forgotten yours."

For any daughter, it would cement the creeping fear that a much-loved parent was succumbing to dementia.

For Carew, it was also the start of a 10-year journey to piece together his history before it was too late.

As her father's memory failed him, the first-time author set about scouring personal archives, military museums and her father's own sometimes muddled recollections to uncover a family history, committing the highs and lows to paper in a part detective story, part memoir.

She was announced as the winner of the Costa Biography Award, after embarking on a painstaking research project to tell the story of the life of the man nicknamed Lawrence of Burma for his heroic exploits during World War 2.

Her book, Dadland: A Journey Into Unchartered Territory, has been hailed as "hilarious and heartbreaking" by judges.

Carew, who previously worked as a visual artist, said she had experienced a "great sense of relief" after learning she had been recognised by the prize, adding: "It's a lovely feeling that the book has resonated with other people in such a strong way."

She added her family history had been the "elephant in the room which stamped its foot" as she had considered what to write, resolving to start researching in earnest after noticing her father had written notes to himself in a bid to "outwit" his dementia.

Lieutenant-Colonel Carew's obituary in 2009, published in the Telegraph, described him as a "natural leader with great charm and a horror of the humdrum" who "liked to stir things up".

He served in World War 2 as part of a Special Operations Executive unit called "The Jedburghs", dropped into Burma with a 55-year-old guide book and a bag of opium for currency before recruiting a guerilla force to outfox the Japanese.

Described variously as the "Lawrence of Burma" and the "Mad Irishmen" for his efforts, he won the Distinguished Service Order and the Croix de Guerre before retiring from the army in 1958 for a varied and not always successful career in business.

Carew's research began in earnest after she escorted her father to a Jedburgh reunion in 2006, noticing he was starting to lose his memory.

Asking him to tell her everything he could recall about his "madcap" life, she went on to piece the information together with extensive archives found in his attic, and newly released official records in which he was mentioned.

"You start rubbing the lamp a bit and the genie pops out: things just kept falling in my lap," she said. "The more I found out, the more amazing it was."

Boxes in her father's house contained newspaper clippings dating back to the war, diaries and buried letters detailing his life.

Further research took Carew to the National Archives, Imperial War Museum and British Library, where she found videos and audio files starring her father, including one memorable film which saw him swaggering out of the Burmese jungle aged 24.

Trunks, cardboard boxes and desk drawers revealed a Christmas card from the head of the CIA, while the release of classified files allowed the author to match her father's colourful anecdotes with real-life dates, places, code names and operational details on papers stamped Top Secret.

The book also tells of the Carews' complicated family life, including the breakdown of her mother.

"I decided that if I was going to tell a story like this, I wasn't going to censor anything," said Carew. "It's a very extraordinary story but it's also very universal when it comes to family, dementia and relationships."

BOOK BITES

£5000 - the prize money for the category winners in this year's race for the Costa Book of the Year Award. The winners are Sebastian Barry for his novel Days Without End; Francis Spufford for his debut novel Golden Hill; Keggie Carew for her memoir Dadland; Brian Conaghan for his children's book The Bombs That Brought Us Together, and Alice Oswald, who won the poetry category for her collection Falling Awake. The overall £30000-winning book of the year winner will be announced on January 31.

The town of Hawes in Yorkshire - where bookseller Steve Bloom has been labelled the rudest bookseller in the UK after several complaints about his second-hand bookshop. Like Bernard Black, comedian Dylan Moran's character in the television series Black Books, Bloom has enraged customers over the last four years by his behaviour - including the charging of a 50p entrance fee and an incident in which he called the police on a customer who refused to pay. Asked to comment, Bloom said "I am not really a people person, I say what I think, I don't butter my parsnips."

91 - the age of journalist, novelist and jazz critic Nat Hentoff who died this week. He wrote for the Village Voice for 50 years on a plethora of subjects beyond jazz and country music - which included censorship, education, and racial conflicts in the US. - Tymon Smith