In recognition of a unique writing talent, OFM honours the late restaurant reviewer with this special award
No opening paragraph of a restaurant review has ever delivered as much shock and sudden sadness as that with which AA Gill began his Table Talk on 20 November last year. His account of a trip to Whitby, to the Magpie Café, “the best chippy in the world”, was also a heartfelt, clear-eyed farewell. He had cancer, “the full English” of the disease, the fact of which, of course, didn’t for a moment stop him from enjoying the Magpie’s proper “round-vowelled tea” and delighting in the fact that Whitby’s older residents appeared to be dressed as the home guard.
In the fortnight that followed, which ended with news of Gill’s death– news which coincided, ever the pro, with his final showstopping byline in a tribute to the better and worse of his experience with the NHS – it was hard to reconcile the life of his writing with the full stop and pending silence he described. Gill always said that he never wanted to be famous, only to be read. Bill Deedes, the Telegraph legend who wrote his own last column the week before he died at 94, was a hero. “I want to go on doing this for ever,” Gill used to say. That final unforgettable bit of Table Talk, and that last column, at the very least made good on that ambition.
Related: AA Gill dies weeks after revealing he had cancer in restaurant review
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His column did for food criticism what Clive James’s had done for TV – he made it a spectator sport
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