I’ve just learned that I’ve been selected as the winner of the Beryl Bainbridge First Time Author Award 2021 for my novel You Have to Make Your Own Fun Around Here. I feel so incredibly honoured.
Beryl Bainbridge DBE was a Liverpudlian author who won the Whitbread Award on two occasions, and was nominated for the Booker prize on no less than five occasions. She wrote eighteen novels, two short story collections, several plays, and copious theatre reviews.
She was a truly inspiring creative. From her obituary in the Guardian, “Each novel emerged from a few months in which she wrote through the night, smoked a lot, slept and ate little. She constantly read aloud what she had produced, to get “the music of the prose” right, and in an alchemical process of cutting and perfecting, she would distil every dozen or so draft pages into one sheet without a single wasted word.”
I feel as though Beryl is going to be an inspiration to me from now and long into the future. To be associated with someone so extraordinary feels very special indeed.