The Sports Bookshelf

Donald McRae's chance to become the first triple winner of William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award remains intact after the shortlist for 27th edition of the richest and longest-running prize for sportswriting was revealed. The author and Guardian journalist, who has twice won the prize for books with boxing at their heart, returns to the subject with A Man's World , his biography of the US boxer Emile Griffith, who became a world champion while fighting deep-seated prejudices on two counts, not only as a black man but because he was gay at a time when the American Medical Association still regarded homosexuality as a psychiatric disorder. McRae -- who ghosted Steven Gerrard's bestselling autobiography My Story -- won previously in 1996 with Dark Trade: Lost in Boxing and in 2002 for In Black and White: The Untold Story of Joe Louis and Jesse Owens. The only other double winner of the William Hill prize is Duncan Hamilton. Three football books are among the

Donald McRae, the Guardian writer who is one of only two authors to have won the William Hill Sports Book of the Year award twice, is in contention to take sports writing's richest literary prize for a third time. A Man's World: The Double Life of Emile Griffith (Simon & Schuster) is named on a longlist of 14 titles for the 2015 edition of the award, the winner of which will be revealed in November. In A Man's World, McRae tells the story of the American boxer who became world champion in both welterweight and middleweight divisions during a 19-year career but was also gay at a time when homosexuality was a crime in all but one of the American states and still classified by the American Medical Association as a 'psychiatric disorder'. McRae's ability to draw the reader into the story is particularly strong in his recounting of the rivalry between Griffith and Benny "Kid" Paret, the Cuban fighter against whom he battled for the world wel