Portico prize winner Benjamin Myers: 'Why bother chasing the big publishers?'

After being turned down by ‘every major publisher in London’ for his Portico winning novel Beastings, the author says landing the £10,000 prize ‘felt like a vindication’ Portico prize winner Benjamin Myers: 'Why bother chasing the big publishers?'Portico prize winner Benjamin Myers: 'Why bother chasing the big publishers?'

‘I’m from the margins, or the underground’ ... Benjamin Myers. Photograph: Julian Germain 

Alison Flood - Wednesday 9 December 2015 - The Guardian

Benjamin Myers, who has beaten Alan Garner to win the £10,000 Portico prize for literature for his novel Beastings, has spoken of how he was “turned down by every major publisher in London” before landing a book deal.

Set in Cumbria in the distant past, Beastings sees a teenage girl pursued by a priest when she abducts a child. Written in prose “as primal and denuded as the fells themselves”, according to the Guardian, which called its climax “so gruesome it leaves you feeling a little light-headed”, it took the Portico award for the best novel set mainly in the north of England, at the end of last month.

Myers, who won the Gordon Burn prize for his previous novel Pig Iron, while his novel Richard was chosen as a Sunday Times book of the year, said that winning the Portico “felt like a vindication – a validation” of the effort that went into Beastings, his fourth novel.  More