Skip to main content
Beryl Bainbridge at home in Camden Town, London, 1998

Beryl Bainbridge

Prizes judged

Beryl Bainbridge, who died in 2010, was a Booker Prize heroine

Although Bainbridge was shortlisted for the Booker Prize five times, she never won. Some degree of correction occurred in 2011 when, after a public vote, her 1998-shortlisted novel Master Georgie won a one-off prize, The Man Booker Best of Beryl. 

She was an actress (appearing in Coronation Street) before becoming a novelist and much-loved, cigarette-dangling public figure. The author of 20 novels, she found her greatest success with historical fiction. Of the 1977 judging, she recalled that the chair, Philip Larkin, ‘was completely silent most of the time. Nobody dared say a word to him and he never said a word back.’ Of her own multiple nominations, she said: ‘I’m just very pleased to have been noticed’.

Author photo © David Levenson / Getty Images

Read more on Beryl Bainbridge

All nominated books

Every Man for Himself
Beryl Bainbridge’s fictional history chronicles the fate of the privileged passengers of the Titanic on its doomed maiden voyage
Master Georgie
Beryl Bainbridge explores the British experience of the Crimean War through the adventures - and hidden secrets - of her enigmatic central character
According to Queeney
Beryl Bainbridge’s masterly evocation of Dr Johnson, arguably Britain’s greatest Man of Letters, in all his wit and glory
The Dressmaker
The mundane and the macabre collide in Beryl Bainbridge’s darkly comic tale about the shockingly unexpected consequences of a young girl’s heartbreak
The Bottle Factory Outing
Surprises abound in Beryl Bainbridge’s unsettling comic novel, praised by fellow author Graham Greene as both ‘outrageously funny and horrifying’