Nina Bawden’s powerful exploration of deception gradually unfolds a moving story about lies and truths, forgery and fidelity, love and loss
Nina Bawden
- Prizes judged
Nina Bawden was the author of more than 50 books for adults and children and was perhaps best known for her children’s novel Carrie’s War (1973), a story of wartime child evacuees
As a judge, Bawden opposed the winning book, Keri Hulme’s The Bone People, on the grounds of its strand of child-beatings, and later publicly distanced herself from the panel’s decision. Two years after Bawden’s judging stint, she was shortlisted for the Booker with Circles of Deceit, and, in 2010, her Birds on the Trees was also shortlisted for the Lost Man Booker Prize (which recognised the novels that had slipped through a chronological kink in 1970). In 2002, Bawden was badly injured in the Potters Bar rail crash – in which her husband, Austen Kark, was killed.
All nominated books
Nina Bawden’s portrait of a family in crisis raises fundamental questions about parents and children, offering tentative hope, but no tidy solutions
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