Princess Beatrice issued an apology on Tuesday evening after she was absent from the Oscar’s Book Prize in West London.
Ahead of announcing the winner of the coveted £10,000 award, James Ashton who created the charity with his wife, Viveka Alvestrand, took to the stage and revealed that Princess Beatrice sent her apologies for not attending.
Adding: “You may have noticed that she added to her family recently,” referring to the arrival of Beatrice and her husband Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi’s baby daughter Athena, whom they welcomed in January.
HELLO! attended the inspirational event which took place at the ultra-exclusive Ivy Club.
A personal connection
Beatrice has been a patron of the charity since 2017 after helping to judge the prize the previous year.
The Princess has written publicly about her struggles with dyslexia as a child, and how the support of her parents and the magic of stories helped her fall in love with reading.
Talking about the charity, she previously told the Evening Standard: “I am delighted to become the patron of Oscar’s Book Prize.
© Getty“Taking the time to read together as a family became a ritual for us and I treasure the memories created whilst poring over the pages of the books my mother would collect for us, many of which I treasure to this day.”
Talking about how her mother Sarah helped her through her early years struggle with reading, she said: “I was lucky my mother, with her great imagination, took the time to work on these with me. By the time I read Harry Potter, aged 11, I tore through the pages.”
“I was lucky my mother, with her great imagination, took the time to work on these with me. By the time I read Harry Potter, aged 11, I tore through the pages.”
Meaningful cause
The Oscar’s Book Prize is an incredibly moving charity, and was launched in 2014 in honour three-year-old Oscar Ashton who died in 2012 due to an undetected heart disorder.
Oscar is described as being: “A sunny and creative boy, with a quirky, inquiring mind and big brown eyes. He collected stones, Lego bricks and pound coins — or, as he called them, ‘goldens’.
His imagination meant that he told stories about wolves and gold medals, and insisted that his toy penguin should come to the nativity service when all the other kids had a stuffed sheep or camel.
“When he was looking out of the window for shooting stars, he explained that it was “because they have fire in their tails.”
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