Paperboy wins inaugural prize for gay men's books - Christopher Fowler's memoir takes the first Green Carnation prize

Benedicte Page -  guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 1 December 2010

Christopher Fowler's memoir of a lonely 1960s childhood, Paperboy, has been awarded the inaugural Green Carnation prize, set up this year to celebrate fiction and memoirs written by gay men.

Fowler's memoir recounts the tale of a suburban London boy who divides his time between the cinema and the library, devouring stories and taking refuge from a tense family environment in the world of words. The prize panel called the book "beautifully written", and "a rich and astute evocation of a time and a place", recalling a childhood "at once eccentric and endearingly ordinary." Chair of the judges, novelist Paul Magrs, said Paperboy was "about the forming of a gay sensibility – but more than that, it's about the growth of a reader and a wonderfully generous and inventive writer".

Magrs, who is also a lecturer on the Manchester Metropolitan University's creative writing MA, helped set up the Green Carnation prize earlier this year after realising there was no literary award for gay men's books in the UK. He described the lack of such a prize as "scandalous", saying: "There ought to be something that celebrates and publicises the breadth and variety of their work. Writing by gay men can be funny, exciting, harrowing, uplifting and challenging – and it can range right across the genres. It can also be created by men from all classes and races."

The prize, which has no cash value, is named after the green carnation historically sometimes worn as an emblem of homosexuality – Oscar Wilde often carried one on his lapel.

The prize was judged this year by Magrs, Simon Savidge, who is the London editor of Bent magazine, crime writer Lesley Cookman, actress Katy Manning and book blogger Nick Campbell.

The other shortlisted works were all novels: God Says No by James Hannaham, the story of a young black Christian struggling with his homosexuality, Rupert Smith's London-set novel Man's World, and two debuts, Children of the Sun by Max Schaefer and Jonathan Kemp's London Triptych.

And for further reading a review from The Independent.