The Sports Bookshelf

Today has been the publishing world's so-called Super Thursday, the October date that signals the start of the Christmas sales push. Among 97 new titles to hit the shelves, the crop of new sports books includes offerings from Stuart Broad and Gary Lineker -- and two books that will hope to benefit from the wave of popularity that has made Bradley Wiggins into a strong contender to be named BBC Sports Personality of the Year. We will not know the thoughts of the Tour de France winner and Olympic champion himself until November 8 -- publication date for Yellow Jersey's new Wiggins autobiography, My Time -- but in the meantime, two titles celebrating the feats of sport's most famous mod revivalist are released today. Bradley Wiggins: The Story of Britain's Greatest Ever Cyclist , by Press Association journalist Matt McGeehan is published by Carlton Books .  The 128-page biography looks at how the Wiggins 2012 success story has been more than a decade in the making,

Engage: The Fall and Rise of Matt Hampson, written by award-winning journalist Paul Kimmage and published by Simon & Schuster, has been named as the British Sports Book Awards overall 'Sports Book of the Year' for 2012 after a public online vote.  Sports book fans were invited to name their favourite from the winning titles in each category from the British Sports Book Awards. Engage , deemed by the awards judges to be the best biography of the year at last month's British Sports Book Awards ceremony at the Savoy Hotel in London, tells the moving story of Matt Hampson , a promising young rugby player who was paralysed from the neck down after an accident in an England training session. Remarkably, Hampson has adjusted with enormous courage to a limited everyday life.  He is constantly attached to breathing equipment because the damage to his body left him unable to inflate and deflate his lungs unaided yet attended the awards dinner alongside Kimmage. Mick De

News Award-winning writer Paul Kimmage is to ghost the autobiography of Ireland’s Grand Slam-winning rugby captain, Brian O’Driscoll. Dublin-born Kimmage, who recently won the William Hill Irish Sports Book of the Year prize for Engage: The Fall and Rise of Matt Hampson , has been signed up as part of the deal that landed Penguin Ireland the O’Driscoll story. O’Driscoll, who was voted world player of the decade by Rugby World magazine in January 2010, is one of only two men to captain Ireland to a Grand Slam.  He has also led them to four Triple Crown triumphs and is Irish rugby’s all-time highest international try scorer with 46. Kimmage, who recently left the Sunday Times , said he was honoured by the invitation to write O’Driscoll’s book. "It's incredibly flattering to be asked to do it,” he said. “Brian is one of our (Ireland’s) genuine superstars.” Yet admirers of the 38-year-old former professional cyclist will not be at all surprised at Penguin’s eagerness

William Hill Sports Book of the Year award -- the contenders The winner of the 2011 William Hill Sports Book of the Year will be revealed tomorrow.  For the last week, The Sports Bookshelf has been presenting a run-down of the seven titles on the short list. Today: Engage: The Fall and Rise of Matt Hampson  (Simon & Schuster) THE STORY: It was March 15, 2005. Matt Hampson, a 20-year-old tight-head prop from the Leicester Tigers club, was taking part in a training session with an England Under-21 team that included Ben Foden, Toby Flood and James Haskell. The forwards were in full, contested scrum practice. Not unusually, as 16 hefty men confront each other in a shoving match, the scrum would collapse from time to time. Thankfully, despite the risks inherent, the players normally pick themselves up unscathed and resume practice. On this occasion, however, it was different. By some freak of physics, the full force of this collapse ended up being borne by Matt Hampson’s

As the professional wordsmith behind his column in The Times , Owen Slot had been Jonny Wilkinson’s ghostwriter for seven years before they began to collaborate on the England rugby star’s autobiography yet it was not long before he discovered he knew his subject less well than he thought. “It was abundantly clear that Jonny’s life story was more complicated, infinitely deeper and darker than I had imagined,” Slot writes in a piece accompanying the serialisation of Jonny: My Autobiography in The Times this week. The book -- due out this Thursday -- takes readers on a candid and deeply personal voyage into the farthest reaches of Wilkinson’s complex character, setting out the inner torment that has even accompanied much of his success as well as darkening the days of his long periods of physical injury. It reveals the fears that have dogged him since childhood and tipped him sometimes into bouts of depression and which have made the goals of fulfilment and true happiness almost

By Jon Culley No one can know whether Matt Hampson would have played in a Rugby World Cup but he was established on a path towards full international recognition when a commonplace incident on the training field changed his life forever. It was March 15, 2005 and Hampson, a 20-year-old tight-head prop from the Leicester Tigers club, was in a practice session with an England Under-21 team that included Ben Foden, Toby Flood and James Haskell, who was directly behind Hampson in the second row.  All are currently in New Zealand with Martin Johnson’s England squad. The forwards, under the supervision of Tony Spreadbury, an international referee, were in full, contested scrum practice. Not unusually, during such sessions, the scrum would collapse from time to time. Thankfully, despite the risks inherent when 16 hefty men engage in a head-first shoving match, such collapses seldom result in serious injury.  This occasion, however, was different. By some freak of physics, the full