DAME BERYL BAINBRIDGE
Dame Beryl Bainbridge was one of Britain’s greatest writers. The author of 18 novels, she won The Guardian Fiction Prize, The Whitbread Prize for Fiction, The James Tait Black Memorial Prize and The David Cohen Prize for Literature. She was nominated for The Booker Prize a record five times, famously never winning. A profligate drinker of whiskey (Bell’s), smoker of cigarettes (Silk Cut) and watcher of Soaps, (Coronation Street) she was a mainstay of the British literary scene throughout the 1970s, 80s, 90s and 00s. Her wickedly sharp prose, darkly comic novels, self-deprecating persona and iconic look won her many fans, and she was regularly called upon to appear on radio and television throughout this time. She wrote a weekly column for The London Evening Standard and became theatre reviewer for The Oldie magazine in 1992.
Born in Liverpool in 1932 to Winifred Bains and Richard Bainbridge, her only sibling an older brother, Ian, many of Beryl’s novels were based on what she characterised as a difficult childhood and fraught home life - though she was often capable of mixing fact and fiction, and never let the truth get in the way of a good story.
Expelled from school for writing a dirty limerick, Beryl had a vivid imagination and wrote her first novel aged 14. She was thought to be the youngest Associate of Dramatic Arts to receive a Gold Medal from The London Academy of Music, Drama & Art aged 12 years old, and would go on to work as an actress in repertory theatre at the Liverpool Playhouse from the age of 16.
At the Playhouse she met Austin Davies, an artist who taught at Liverpool Art College. Beryl and Austin married in 1954 and had two children, Aaron and Jo-Jo, before the relationship fell apart. She had a third child, Rudi, with screenwriter Alan Sharpe, and though she had many further relationships in her life - and many affairs, including with her publisher, Colin Haycraft - she never remarried. Her closest working relationships included with her agents, Margaret Hewson, and later Margaret’s husband Andrew; her Editor, Anna Haycraft; and her secretary and biographer, Brendan King. Her cats were called Gerald and Pudding.
A grandmother of seven and matriarch to her family, Beryl died of cancer in 2010, surrounded by her loved ones and listening to opera in a hospital room overlooking her beloved Camden Town. She is much missed, but lives on in her books.