Amy Winehouse has been recognised with an entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
The multi-award-winning singer, who died on July 23 2011, has had her biography added to the online national record. The catalogue lists details of the lives of deceased men and women who have shaped British culture and history worldwide.
Her entry reads: “Amy Winehouse (1983-2011) was an enormously talented singer whose three studio albums were hugely popular and influential (one, Back to Black, selling more than 3.5 million copies in the UK alone) but whose self-destructive streak led to her eventual death from alcohol poisoning at just twenty-seven.”
If she had lived, Winehouse would now be 30. She is the second youngest entry in the catalogue of deceased notable individuals.
Film-star Elizabeth Taylor, who converted to Judaism after the death of her third husband, is also among the 223 names which have just been added to the 130-year-old catalogue.
Lucian Freud, grandson of Sigmund Freud and Christopher Hitchens, who discovered that he was Jewish at the age of 38, have also just been added.
The new additions bring the total number of biographies in the catalogue to 59,453. The updated list has caused controversy because it includes Jimmy Savile, who is described in the catalogue as “disc jockey, broadcaster and sexual predator.”
The print edition of the catalogue, which is overseen by academic editors of Oxford University, goes up to deaths in 2008, costs £500 and takes up 12 feet of shelf space.
