Beryl Bainbridge
Dame Beryl Bainbridge was born in Lancashire in November 1934. She worked as an actress at Liverpool Repertory Theatre. She was awarded a DBE in 2000. She wrote her first novel, Harriet Said, during the 1950s, although it was not published until 1972. She has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize five times; The Dressmaker (1973); The Bottle Factory Outing (1974), which won the Guardian Fiction Prize; An Awfully Big Adventure (1990) which was made into a film in 1995; Every Man For Himself (1996) which won the Whitbread Novel Award; and Master Georgie (1998) which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction).
