CATE Haste, the wife of veteran arts broadcaster and writer Lord Bragg, has won the 2011 Lakeland Book of the Year competition with her biography of tragic Cumbrian artist Sheila Fell.

In Sheila Fell: A Passion for Paint, Lady Bragg explores the short life of one of the few women artists to gain national recognition in the 50s and 60s.

She was one of the youngest artists to be elected a Royal Academician and was praised by L S Lowry as one of the best landscape painters of the age.

Lady Bragg, a freelance TV documentary producer, director and writer, received her overall winner’s prize - the Bookends Prize for Arts and Literature - at a literary luncheon today in Armathwaite Hall Country House and Spa at Bassenthwaite near Keswick.

Runners-up were Maryport by Edna Croft, a memoir of growing up in Maryport in the 1950s; The Adventures of Henry Dent, Farmer, Poet, Gold Digger, Sawyer by Cathy Smith; and The Life and Times of an Ossick Lad by Geoffrey Elleray, the autobiography of a Great Urswick man.

The David Winkworth Prize for Illustration and Presentation was a self-published book by Stuart Roy Clarke, Cumbria Surrounded – Somewhere Across A Promised Land.

The winner of The Michael Berry Prize for Guides, Walks and Places was Cumbria: Pevsner’s Architectural Guide by Matthew Hyde, published by Yale University Press, based on the series written by Nikolaus Pevsner and featuring details of hundreds of buildings across Cumbria.

The Bill Rollinson Prize for Landscape and Tradition was won by Jane Renouf and Rob David of Ambleside Oral History Group, for Voices of the Lake District, published by the History Press.

The Saint & Co Prize for People and Business went to Arthur Ransome: Master Storyteller by Roger Wardale, published by Great Northern Books.

This year’s competition attracted 54 entries, including, for the first time, en Ebook on Furness Abbey by Alice Leach.

The judging panel was headed by the writer Hunter Davies and included broadcaster Fiona Armstrong, Cumbrian author Kathleen Jones of Appleby and writer and broadcaster, Eric Robson of Wasdale.