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 when writing An Awfully Big Adventure, which was adapted into a 1995 film starring Hugh Grant and Alan Rickman, and is also available from McNally Editions. 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.