From the speech...

It is now my special pleasure to announce a very special award to a very special science scribe – the ABSW Lifetime Achievement award. We don't do this every year, not by any means, which is to say I can't remember when we last did it, or even if we ever have. But the judges decided to do make this award, and what the judges want, they get.

The recipient is a man of mixed history and many talents. He left school at 16, and his early journalistic career was dominated by the pull of the sea, it seems, both in his native country and later, in Britain , where he worked on Fishing News and on newspapers in Hull and Dover before moving to one of our august national newspapers – where he still is. A winner of the ABSW science writing prize – five times now – he has also made his mark in the literary pages, famously failing to be given even an interview for the then vacant position of Editor of New Scientist because the publisher thought he was just a cultural journalist. Ah, well, publishers…where would we be without them…

Apart from winning prizes and writing books, he is always ready to talk to young audiences about our craft, and is a noted mentor of interns.

One of his greatest works has never been published conventionally, I think: apart from his writing about science, he is also the author of the much-photocopied Manifesto for the Simple Scribe, a series of 25 maxims of which I shall quote only one:

“Beware of long and preposterous words. Beware of jargon. If you are a science writer this is doubly important. If you are a science writer, you occasionally have to bandy words that no ordinary human ever uses, like phenotype, mitochondrion, cosmic inflation, Gaussian distribution and isostasy. So you really don't want to be effulgent, or felicitous as well. You could just try being bright and happy.”

He is, of course, New Zealand 's greatest bright and happy export…Tim Radford. He is not here tonight, however. He is, though, having dinner, in the south of France . And if the miracle of mobile phones is still in operation, I think he can hear us.