Winner of The Colby Book Prize
Undercover: Victorian Investigative Journalism in Fact and Fiction (Cambridge UP, 2025) by Stephen Donovan (Uppsala University) and Matthew Rubery (Queen Mary University of London) has been awarded The Colby Book Prize.
Judges' verdict: This page-turner of a book is the work of many years of deep, rigorous research. Drawing on a broad range of provincial and London newspapers between the 1860s and the First World War, it offers a revisionist history of undercover journalism that proves emphatically that investigative journalism began many years before Stead’s notorious exposé of 1885. It is a book that asks new questions about the impact of undercover journalism on readers, how it transformed fictional narratives and how it commented on precarity and mobility as well as poverty. Beautifully erudite and consistently illuminating, it is a book that will continue to influence the field of periodical studies for decades to come.
