Sources and method

Each recipient page keeps two things apart. The dossier and the dated facts — award year, birth and death years, newspapers, beats — are drawn from public reference material and are meant to be accurate. The writing around them is interpretation, and it is ours. Where a fact cannot be confirmed, it is left out rather than guessed at.

The recipients are, for the most part, well documented: many were famous in their own right, and their deaths were marked by long obituaries in the papers they wrote for. We check the record primarily against the relevant encyclopedia entries and published obituaries, and we link the reference at the foot of each profile so you can follow it yourself. Where accounts disagree, we say so rather than pick a side quietly.

A handful of recipients were sports editors and executives rather than bylined columnists. For them the public paper trail is thinner, and their pages are shorter and stick closely to what can be verified.

This is an archive built by hand, and hands make mistakes. If you spot an error of fact, we want to fix it. The about page explains what the project is; corrections to the record are always welcome and always acted on.