Wednesday, 7 September 2011

Mercury Prize 2011 winner PJ Harvey

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This year's Mercury Prize was won by PJ Harvey, but who has won the award before, and who tops the all-time sales chart?
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PJ Harvey wins Mercury music prize for the second time
PJ Harvey was praised by Mercury prize judges for the artistic coherency of her latest album, Let England Shake. Photograph: Luke Macgregor/Reuters

PJ Harvey became the first artist to win the Mercury Prize twice on Tuesday night, when she scooped the award for her album Let England Shake. Her previous win was in 2001, for Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea.

Harvey beat artists including Tinie Tempah, Adele, Anna Calvi and previous winners Elbow. You can listen to all the Mercury-nominated albums over on the Culture pages.

Started in 1992, the Mercury prize for best album has gone to a wide variety of artists, but how have they fared after their win? We wanted to find out just how successful each of the winning albums was - both in terms of UK chart position and album sales.

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Last year, we looked at album sales for each of the previous winners a week after the Mercury Prize was awarded. Winning band the xx had climbed up the album charts from 10th to 3rd place, with sales totalling 215,000. In comparison 2009's winner, Speech Debelle, had received little benefit from her victory, with approximate sales of her winning album Speech Therapy only reaching 15,000.

The bestselling previous winner, as of September last year, was Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not by the Arctic Monkeys, which had shifted roughly 1,345,000 copies. Only Franz Ferdinand's eponymous 2004 debut (1,265,000) and Pulp's 1995 classic Different Class (1,240,000) came close.

We'll be updating the sales and chart position data for all the winners later on, as well as chart positions for all of this year's nominees, so check back. We'll also take another look at the data in the coming weeks, to see whether PJ Harvey's album has received a Mercury 'bounce'.

Check out the table below for previous Mercury Prize winners by sales and chart position, or download the spreadsheet for details of all the 2010 nominees. We've even included links to Guardian reviews of all the albums.

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