Hall wins Green Carnation Prize

07.12.11 | Katie Allen - The Bookseller

Catherine Hall has beaten authors including Colm Tóibín and Jackie Kay to this year’s Green Carnation Prize for her second novel The Proof of Love.
The prize celebrates writing by LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) authors. It attracted some controversy earlier in the year for not including Alan Hollinghurst, Philip Hensher or Ali Smith on its shortlist.
Chair of judges Simon Savidge said: “I am thrilled, along with all the other judges, that Catherine Hall has won this year's Green Carnation prize . . . This is one of those rare novels in which you get so lost you forget that it is fiction." He added: "It is the sort of novel that storytelling and reading are all about, wonderfully written and a book you want to pass on and recommend to everyone you know.”
Hall said “I’m utterly delighted to have won the Green Carnation Prize—a completely unexpected pleasure, especially given the calibre of the other writers on the shortlist. It’s a great way of raising the profile of LGBT writing, which I think can only be a good thing.”
The Proof of Love, published by Portobello, follows a young Cambridge mathematician who takes on a job as a farm labourer in the Lake District during the hot summer of 1976.
The other shortlisted titles were: The Strange Case of the Composer and his Judge by Patricia Duncker (Bloomsbury); Red Dust Road by Jackie Kay (Picador); Remembrance of Things I Forgot by Bob Smith (Terrace Books); Ever Fallen in Love by Zoe Strachan (Sandstone Press); and Colm Tóibín's The Empty Family (Penguin Books).