Edmund de Waal

Two hundred and sixty-four Japanese netsuke, carved toggles of wood and ivory small enough to close a hand around, came to de Waal from a great-uncle in Tokyo. Charles Ephrussi had bought them in Paris in the 1870s. They went to Vienna as a wedding present, survived the seizure of the family's palace on the Ringstrasse in 1938 because a maid called Anna carried them out a few at a time in her apron pocket, and reached Japan after the war. The Hare With Amber Eyes, published in 2010, follows the objects and through them the Ephrussi, grain traders out of Odessa who became bankers in Paris and Vienna and lost almost everything under the German occupation. It took the Costa Book Award for biography. De Waal is a potter by trade, known for installations of many small porcelain vessels ranged in vitrines, and he writes about objects the way a maker handles them.