The Ruth Hadden Memorial Award is a former award for the best first novel published in Britain, which was administered by the Booktrust. It was awarded in the early 1990s and has now been discontinued. [1]
The award was unusual in that the prize was awarded to a completed manuscript before acceptance by a publisher, and the prize money (in 1994, £2000) went to the publishers of the novel to spend on promoting it. [2] [3] [4]
Sir William Gerald Golding was a British novelist, playwright, and poet. Best known for his debut novel Lord of the Flies (1954), he published another twelve volumes of fiction in his lifetime. In 1980, he was awarded the Booker Prize for Rites of Passage, the first novel in what became his sea trilogy, To the Ends of the Earth. He was awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize in Literature.
Dame Margaret Drabble, Lady Holroyd, is an English biographer, novelist and short story writer.
The John Llewellyn Rhys Prize was a literary prize awarded annually for the best work of literature by an author from the Commonwealth aged 35 or under, written in English and published in the United Kingdom. Established in 1942, it was one of the oldest literary awards in the UK.
The University of East Anglia's Creative Writing Course was founded by Sir Malcolm Bradbury and Sir Angus Wilson in 1970. The M.A. has been regarded among the most prestigious in the United Kingdom.
David George Joseph Malouf is an Australian poet, novelist, short story writer, playwright and librettist. Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2008, Malouf has lectured at both the University of Queensland and the University of Sydney. He also delivered the 1998 Boyer Lectures.
Catherine A. Merriman is a British novelist, short-story writer and editor who has published five novels and three short-story collections. Her work often addresses the experiences of women. Her first novel, Leaving the Light On (1992), won the Ruth Hadden Memorial Award; her other works include the novels Fatal Observations (1993) and State of Desire (1996); the short-story collections Silly Mothers (1991), shortlisted for the Wales Book of the Year, and Getting a Life (2001); and the edited collection Laughing, Not Laughing: Women Writing on 'My Experience of Sex' (2004), which won an Erotic Award. Born in London, she has lived in Wales since 1973, and is often considered to be a Welsh author.
Ursula Dubosarsky is an Australian writer of fiction and non-fiction for children and young adults, whose work is characterised by a child's vision and comic voice of both clarity and ambiguity.
Andrew Crumey is a novelist and former literary editor of the Edinburgh newspaper Scotland on Sunday. His works of literary fiction incorporate elements of speculative fiction, historical fiction, philosophical fiction and Menippean satire. Brian Stableford has called them "philosophical fantasies". The Spanish newspaper El Mundo called Crumey "one of the most interesting and original European authors of recent years."
Meg Rosoff is an American writer based in London, United Kingdom. She is best known for the novel How I Live Now, which won the Guardian Prize, the Printz Award, the Branford Boase Award and made the Whitbread Awards shortlist. Her second novel, Just in Case, won the annual Carnegie Medal from the British librarians recognising the year's best children's book published in the UK.
Tim Pears is an English novelist. His novels explore social issues as they are processed through the dynamics of family relationships.
Jennifer Sheila Uglow is an English biographer, historian, critic and publisher. She was an editorial director of Chatto & Windus. She has written critically acclaimed biographies of Elizabeth Gaskell, William Hogarth, Thomas Bewick, and Edward Lear, and a history and joint biography of the Lunar Society, among others, and has also compiled The Macmillan Dictionary of Women's Biography.
Shena Mackay FRSL is a Scottish novelist born in Edinburgh. She was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1996 for The Orchard on Fire, and was shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize and the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2003 for Heligoland.
Ross Raisin FRSL is a British novelist.
Peter Ackroyd is an English biographer, novelist and critic with a specialist interest in the history and culture of London. For his novels about English history and culture and his biographies of, among others, William Blake, Charles Dickens, T. S. Eliot, Charlie Chaplin and Sir Thomas More, he won the Somerset Maugham Award and two Whitbread Awards. He is noted for the volume of work he has produced, the range of styles therein, his skill at assuming different voices, and the depth of his research.
Julia Eccleshare MBE is a British journalist and writer on the subject of children's books. She has been Children's Books editor for The Guardian newspaper for more than ten years, at least from 2000. She is also an editorial contributor and advisor for the website Love Reading 4 Kids. She is a recipient of the Eleanor Farjeon Award.
Andrew Cowan is an English novelist and nonfiction author, who directed the creative writing programme at the University of East Anglia in 2008–18. His six novels include Pig (1994).
Evelyn Rose Strange "Evie" Wyld is an Anglo-Australian author. Her first novel, After the Fire, A Still Small Voice, won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in 2009, and her second novel, All the Birds, Singing, won the Encore Award in 2013 and the Miles Franklin Award in 2014. Her third novel, The Bass Rock, won the Stella Prize in 2021.
In the Place of Fallen Leaves is Tim Pears's debut novel, published in 1993. It won the Ruth Hadden Memorial Award in 1993 and the Hawthornden Prize in 1994.
Elean Roslyn Thomas was a Jamaican poet, novelist, journalist and activist. She was active in the struggle for women's rights in the Caribbean and the movement for Jamaican national independence, as well as working in Latin America, Eastern and Western Europe and Africa. She was married (1988–1998) to human rights barrister Anthony Gifford.
Pig, is the debut novel of English author Andrew Cowan. Published in 1994 it won the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, a Betty Trask Award, the Ruth Hadden Memorial Award, the Authors' Club Best First Novel Award and a Scottish Council Book Award, and was shortlisted for five other awards.