Wilcox was born and raised by her parents in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Her father owned a shop selling wools as well as haberdashery. He was a man of wide interests, amongst which was music, as well as played professionally in the age of the big bands. Her mother who was a teacher had a particular interest in fashion. The family resided above the shop which still remains in the family. This whole year of healing from the divorce, doing therapy, taking on too many shifts, learning how to meditate, exercising, moving on. I'm ready to date again, and, at my age, these opportunities don't happen very often. He just has to be a good person just by the fact of him being at a silent retreat, right? Plus, I'll hate myself for not trying. I wish he'd stop talking. But Kate nods encouragingly. "Thank you for this question. Just rest in the awareness. If you do act, just observe how your actions affect you and the people around you. The message is not to let the fire burn you up while you sit on your cushion. We're here to learn, to practice attention. Like practicing piano. Not to be statues." I had eleven months to produce both the book and the show. My father died at the beginning of 2014 and it was a tough year. However, I realized early on in my career in exhibition work that you cannot do it all on your own and you have to be a team player. And I had a good team. I am overwhelmed by this book. It is an absolute masterpiece. A book of such beauty and profundity, of such poetry in its emotion and observation ... I found my sense of life transformed by her writing as I often find it transformed after the exhibition of a great artist' LAURA CUMMING

An expert and intimate exploration of a life in clothes: their memories and stories, enchantments and spells. At our first interview, she asked me about my intentions for the retreat. I had told her I was working too hard in the wake of recovering from a divorce. I wanted a change. Because of personal reasons, Wilcox has not shared her precise location of residence. We will immediately update this information if we get the location and images of her house. Is Claire Wilcox dead or alive?

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I want to thank everybody who’s been involved, everyone at PEN, everybody who loves books, all the writers I admire – I think of this great legacy of language we all share and I’m immensely touched and honoured. Thank you.’ Obviously not the only reason. A knife twists in my gut. I watch the nausea rise, and wish the meditation was done. It feels like I'm shielding myself from something.

But what might I miss? I promise myself I will at least go on a walk, first, before giving everything up. Exhibits from Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty, the 2015 V&A exhibition, which Wilcox says was an ‘incredible liberation’. Photograph: Victoria and Albert Museum, London In the end, however, it was not just the sheer quality of the writing, but the inventive and wonderfully aslant approach Claire Wilcox took to telling her own and other stories that made Patch Work this year’s winner.I think this is probably a classic example of a book that doesn’t work as an e-book. As a glossy coffee table tome with stunning pictures for somebody to dip in & out of it may work, but it’s not a book to read from. I also think that the “blurb” needs to be amended to reduce the focus on the V&A curator! If she ever writes a book more focussed on the V&A collection, the textiles, preservation, analysis etc I will be very interested as I did like her writing style! But if I don't, what if Jeff's "The One"? What if he's the man I left John for, the man that I'd lose the chance to be with forever if I don't ACT NOW? Wilcox has published widely and her titles include: Modern Fashion in Detail (V&A, 1998); A Century of Bags (Apple Press, 1998) and The Ambassador Magazine: Promoting Post-War British Textiles and Fashion (Victoria and Albert Museum, 2012). She has also published catalogues to accompany the exhibitions Radical Fashion (Victoria and Albert Museum, 2001), Vivienne Westwood (Victoria and Albert Museum, 2004) and The Golden Age of Couture (Victoria and Albert Museum, 2007). OK. That's OK." I finally say. "But, too much for me now. Can we just sit here a bit longer like we were? Quietly, again? And enjoy the snow and clean air? We don't have mountains like this in Minnesota." Lovely and frustrating read. Wilcox is terribly clever and also touching in her careful construction of her life's garments - made up of memories of her seamstress mother, her haberdasher father, her encounters with fabric and artifice that becomes a lifelong obsession. She is good at showing how key encounters and acquisitions of clothing and accessories throughout her childhood, adolescence and young womanhood come to symbolize her development as both human and historian - most touchingly in her relationships with her parents and her children. The synecdoche of baby shoes, homemade dresses, a walking cane, a clutch bag represent not a linear timeline of Wilcox's life but a collection of the moments that took her from a London council flat and made her the woman she is today (and the Senior Curator of Fashion at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.) The book is a love letter to the V&A, even as Wilcox is deliberately humble about the enormous influence she wields in both the academic and commercial world of fashion, particularly after Savage Beauty, her groundbreaking show on Alexander McQueen. Wilcox is willing to be opaque about the identities - even the names - of those who figure in her autobiographical sketches, though really her tact seems a bit precious when we might divine she is talking about McQueen or Vivienne Westwood or annoying when she does not identify the curator who gave her the big chance at working for the V&A. What's with the secrecy, especially if Wilcox is not attempting a celebrity-ridden piece?