The Sports Bookshelf

To those familiar with the literary standards normally associated with footballers' autobiographies, it will come as no surprise to learn that the William Hill Sports Book of the Year has yet to find a winner from that genre, even though the most prestigious of all sports book prizes is now in its 25th year. That might be about to change.  Among the shortlist for the 2013 award, announced after the field of 17 named in the longlist was reduced to six, is I Am Zlatan Ibrahimovic, the self-told story of one of Europe's most successful strikers. Published in Sweden in 2011, the memoirs of the multi-decorated striker -- currently with Paris St Germain after a career that has brought him league titles in Italy, the Netherlands and Spain as well as France -- sold 500,000 copies in hardback within two months and subsequently achieved worldwide sales running into millions. Ibrahimovic is not short of fans -- the rapture that greeted his four goals for Sweden against England i

As the man whose grand jury testimony brought down the most successful and celebrated cheat in the history of sport, cyclist Tyler Hamilton was out on his own among last year's contenders for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year. The field for this year's prize -- the 25th since the award was launched in 1989 -- looks much more open. The longlist for the 2013 'Bookie Prize' sees football, tennis, rowing, horseracing, athletics, cycling and ping-pong among the sports represented, and features writers and performers from France, the Netherlands, America, Britain, Spain, Italy and Sweden. After the success of Tyler Hamilton's The Secret Race , there is another take on the downfall of Lance Armstrong in the shape of Seven Deadly Sins , which recounts the long campaign waged by another of those who helped expose the truth about the seven-times Tour de France champion's systematic drug use, the Sunday Times journalist, David Walsh. But it will take somet