Durham-born author's Pig Iron wins £5,000 award established to celebrate work echoing the 'fearless, interrogative' spirit of Burn
Prize writer … Gordon Burn was widely hailed as a literary innovator. Benjamin Myers has won the first Gordon Burn prize for his novel Pig Iron. Photograph: Sarah Lee
The first Gordon Burn prize has gone to former music journalist Benjamin Myers for his novel Pig Iron, about a young traveller trying to escape his past after being released from prison.
"I wanted to write a novel about Durham, where I grew up," Myers said. "I was fascinated by the mythology of the place and the characters who lived there. And I wanted to challenge a few stereotypes about travellers: I found programmes like My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding patronising and one-dimensional, and I wanted to present a different, more credible narrative."
The £5,000 prize, set up to celebrate works that "follow in the footsteps" of Gordon Burn's genre-blurring innovations, was awarded at Durham book festival on Saturday.
The novel, brimming with "poetic vernacular", was also shortlisted for the Guardian's Not the Booker prize last year. It begins: "The green cathedral sleeps. Soon it will throw open its doors and let the light in. Shades of amber will creep across the forest floor, the shadows will shrink away, and the daily service of life and growth and death and decay will go on."
Burn, who died in 2009 at the age of 61, was hailed as "a great innovator" in literature for his novels and retellings of some of the UK's most grisly true-crime stories. These included Happy Like Murderers, about serial killers Fred and Rose West, and his biography of Peter Sutcliffe, the so-called Yorkshire Ripper, entitled Somebody's Husband, Somebody's Son
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"I wanted to write a novel about Durham, where I grew up," Myers said. "I was fascinated by the mythology of the place and the characters who lived there. And I wanted to challenge a few stereotypes about travellers: I found programmes like My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding patronising and one-dimensional, and I wanted to present a different, more credible narrative."
The £5,000 prize, set up to celebrate works that "follow in the footsteps" of Gordon Burn's genre-blurring innovations, was awarded at Durham book festival on Saturday.
The novel, brimming with "poetic vernacular", was also shortlisted for the Guardian's Not the Booker prize last year. It begins: "The green cathedral sleeps. Soon it will throw open its doors and let the light in. Shades of amber will creep across the forest floor, the shadows will shrink away, and the daily service of life and growth and death and decay will go on."
Burn, who died in 2009 at the age of 61, was hailed as "a great innovator" in literature for his novels and retellings of some of the UK's most grisly true-crime stories. These included Happy Like Murderers, about serial killers Fred and Rose West, and his biography of Peter Sutcliffe, the so-called Yorkshire Ripper, entitled Somebody's Husband, Somebody's Son
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