The Gordon Burn Prize 2017: Winner Announced
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The Gordon Burn Prize 2017: winner announced Strictly embargoed until 22:00, Thursday 12 October 2017 The Gordon Burn Prize 2017 was awarded on Thursday evening at Durham Book Festival to a writer that turned dreadful fact into eerily engaging fiction. The selection continues the prize’s tradition of recognising brilliant and unique work, the most interesting of contemporary writing. This year it salutes the writer’s brave and daring journey into the dark heart of a notorious Glasgow crime in the service of bringing the story to the page. The winner is: • The Long Drop by Denise Mina (Harvill Secker) The Long Drop was selected from six shortlisted titles of fiction, memoir and travel writing. Mina takes us back to Glasgow in the late 1950s where a series of deeply disturbing and violent murders have shaken the city. The novel is based on the true story of William Watt, who wants answers about his family’s murders, and Peter Manuel, who has them. The reader is drawn in to this unsettling relationship and the gaping chasm between the official verdict and the story people tell each other. Novelist, broadcaster and journalist Ian Sansom, one of the judges, commented: “Denise Mina's The Long Drop is a truly startling and shocking work whose great literary ambition and inventiveness is matched by its moral complexity. In the opinion of the judges, the book upholds and continues that great tradition of literature both as a form of radical inquiry and as great pleasure, epitomised in the work of Gordon Burn.” Denise Mina has published twelve novels, as well as writing short stories, plays and graphic novels adapted from Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy books. The Long Drop was published in March 2017 and immediately garnered praise as “a masterpiece by the woman who may be Britain’s finest living crime novelist” (Daily Telegraph) and “not just a success and a thrilling read in its own right, but a game-changer for the genre” (Stuart Kelly, Scotland on Sunday). The prize was established in 2012 to celebrate the legacy of one of literature’s great innovators. Gordon Burn’s writing was precise and rigorous, and often blurred the line between fact and fiction. Over the past 18 months and since the advent of Brexit and Trump, we have seen the emergence of ideas like 'fake news and 'post-truth'. Gordon's writing often explored these murky and ambiguous territories. He grasped, intuitively, how supposedly 'fact-based' reportage can warp the truth just as fiction can aspire to reveal it. In this respect much of his writing has the ring of contemporary relevance to it. He wrote across a wide range of subjects, from celebrities to serial killers, politics to contemporary art; his works include the novels Fullalove and Born Yesterday: The News as a Novel, and non-fiction including Happy Like Murderers: The Story of Fred and Rosemary West, Best and Edwards: Football, Fame and Oblivion and Sex & Violence, Death & Silence: Encounters with Recent Art. For all media enquiries, please contact: Nikki Barrow at Mander Barrow PR Ltd [email protected]; 07813 806297 Notes for editors The Gordon Burn Prize, run in partnership by the Gordon Burn Trust, New Writing North, Faber & Faber and Durham Book Festival, seeks to celebrate the work of those who follow in his footsteps: novels which dare to enter history and interrogate the past; nonfiction adventurous enough to inhabit characters and events in order to create new and vivid realities. The prize is open to works in English by writers of any nationality or descent who, at the time of entering, are permanently resident in the United Kingdom or the United States of America. Durham Book Festival is a Durham County Council festival produced by New Writing North with funding from partners Durham University and Arts Council England. About The Long Drop: On the 19th of September 1956 Peter Manuel broke into a suburban villa in Glasgow and shot three women in their beds. Then he made himself a ham sandwich. The father of the house, William Watt, was five hours drive away, on a fly fishing holiday but police still suspected him. Watt was odd. He had taken the guard dog with him, which he never did. He established his alibi like a man trying to establish an alibi. William Watt was accused of the murders and sent to prison for three months. Released, Watt decided to investigate the murders himself and put out the word that he would pay for information. Peter Manuel came forward and the two men met for a drink in Glasgow. They spent eleven hours together, drinking, driving, talking. The next time they met was in the High Court in Glasgow, where Manuel was accused of those murders and many others.The Long Drop is a reimagining of the trial and of the drunken night the two men spent carousing in Glasgow. About the judges: Cosey Fanni Tutti is an artist and musician, known for her art, her work in the sex industry, as co-founder of Industrial Records and Throbbing Gristle, and her pioneering electronic music as half of Chris & Cosey and Carter Tutti. Her autobiography, Art, Sex, Music, was published by Faber & Faber in 2017. Petina Gappah is a Zimbabwean writer with law degrees from Cambridge, Graz University and the University of Zimbabwe. Her debut collection of short stories, An Elegy for Easterly, won the Guardian First Book Award in 2009. Her debut novel, The Book of Memory, was published in 2015. Her latest collection of short stories, Rotten Row, was published in 2016. She is published by Faber & Faber. Allan Jenkins is the award-winning editor of Observer Food Monthly. He was previously editor of the Observer Magazine and once lived in an experimental ecocommunity on Anglesey. He is the co-author of J. Sheekey: Fish, and lives in north-west London. His book Plot 29: A Memoir was published in 2017 by 4th Estate. Ian Sansom is a novelist, broadcaster and journalist, contributing to, among others, the Guardian, Times Literary Supplement and London Review of Books. He is the author of fourteen works of fiction and non-fiction and is the Director of the Oscar Wilde Centre, Trinity College Dublin. The Gordon Burn Prize 2017 shortlist: • Black Teeth and a Brilliant Smile by Adelle Stripe (Wrecking Ball Press) • Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe by Kapka Kassabova (Granta Books) • First Love by Gwendoline Riley (Granta Books) • The Long Drop by Denise Mina (Harvill Secker) • This Is Memorial Device by David Keenan (Faber & Faber) • This Is the Place to Be by Lara Pawson (CB Editions) Previous winners: 2013 Benjamin Myers, Pig Iron 2014 Paul Kingsnorth, The Wake 2015 Dan Davies, In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile 2016 David Szalay, All That Man Is Social media: @NewWritingNorth @durhambookfest @FaberBooks #GordonBurnPrize www.gordonburnprize.com The News as a Novel Ten years ago, the late Gordon Burn took the events of 2007 and turned them into Born Yesterday; The News as a Novel, an ambitious and experimental novel about the way news is made, and the way the media creates and manipulates the stories we see before us. In the spirit of this fine literary experiment with fact and fiction, Durham Book Festival and The Word Factory have commissioned three outstanding writers, Lionel Shriver, Alexei Sayle and Benjamin Myers to produce a piece of work in response to the extraordinary unfolding news cycle of 2017. The News as a Novel will premiere at Durham Book Festival 2017 on Friday 13 October. For all media enquiries, please contact: Nikki Barrow at Mander Barrow PR Ltd [email protected]; 07813 806297 .