Mytholmroyd author wins £10,000 Portico Literature Prize
Tuesday, 1 December 2015
Beastings by Benjamin Myers has won the £10,000 Portico Literature Prize 2015.
The winner was announced on 26th November at a gala dinner hosted by Val McDermid at the Mercure Hotel in Manchester.
Previous winners of the Portico Literature Prize include Anthony Burgess, Val McDermid and Sarah Hall
Benjamin Myers was born in Durham, UK, in 1976. Beastings (2014) was the recipient of the Northern Writers' Award and longlisted for a Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Award 2015.
Beastings featured on several end of year lists, and was chosen by Robert Macfarlane in The Big Issue as one of his books of 2014, who wrote, "Beastings is a brilliant, brutal novel, told sparsely but with huge strength. It put me in mind of the work of Ron Rash and Cormac McCarthy in its attention to landscape, and its muscular tone."
Pig Iron (2012) was the winner of the inaugural Gordon Burn Prize 2013.
His novel Richard (2010 ) was chosen as a Sunday Times book of the year. Myers' short story 'The Folk Song Singer' was awarded the Tom-Gallon Prize in 2014 by the Society Of Authors.
His published work includes novels, poetry collections and short stories and his most recent poetry collection, Heathcliff Adrift, exhibited at Durham Cathedral and at The Brontë Parsonage alongside landscape photographs.
Benjamin Myers' work is entirely set in the North of England, and explores marginal characters, rural life, landscapes and the violence of the natural world. His novels form an on-going wider series of works, each set in a different Northern county - Beastings takes places against the backdrop of Cumbria's distant past; Pig Iron considered contemporary post-industrial Durham.
He currently lives in Mytholmroyd.
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