Beryl Bainbridge

Dame Beryl Bainbridge (1934–2010) was born in Liverpool, where she began her adult life working as an actress – an experience she drew on later when writing An Awfully Big Adventure, which was made into a 1995 film, directed by Mike Newell, starring Hugh Grant and Alan Rickman. Five of her seventeen novels were shortlisted for the Booker Prize, which garnered her the nickname “the Booker Bridesmaid”; in 2011, a special Man Booker ‘Best-of Beryl’ Prize was awarded in her honor. Master Georgie (1998) won the James Tait Memorial Prize, and both Injury Time (1977) and Every Man for Himself (1996) were awarded the Whitbread Novel of the Year Prize. Also a talented painter, she lived for many years in a house crammed with eccentric Victoriania in London’s Camden Town, where visitors were forced to squeeze past the stuffed buffalo in her entrance hall.