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Catherine O'Flynn (born 1970) is a British writer. She has published three novels for adults, and two for children as well as various articles and short stories. Her debut novel, What Was Lost , won the prestigious first novel prize at the Costa Book Awards in 2008.
Prior to the publication of What Was Lost she worked in a variety of jobs including deputy manager of a large record shop, post woman, web editor, teacher and mystery shopper. [1] After spending some time in and around Barcelona, she now lives and works in Birmingham, England. She is married to Peter Fletcher, and they have two daughters.
Her first novel, What Was Lost, was published in January 2007. This novel received critical acclaim as an examination of the often lacklustre and empty experience of modern life, contrasted with the energy and optimism of a young girl who went missing in the mid-1980s. [2] What Was Lost was long listed for the 2007 Man Booker Prize for Fiction and the Orange Prize for Fiction, and shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award. [3] [4] It won the Jelf Group First Novel Award at the Guildford Book Festival and the prestigious First Novel prize at the Costa Book Awards in January 2008. [5] [6] In April 2008 she was named Newcomer of the Year at the Galaxy British Book Awards.
Her second book, The News Where You Are was published on 1 July 2010 and launched the following day at Ikon Gallery in Birmingham. [7] It features the tale of a disenchanted local TV news anchor, who becomes obsessed with the unheralded deaths that he is routinely required to report as part of his day job. One of the stories he follows up has a curious connection to his own life and his seemingly ageless predecessor. O'Flynn was praised for being in this novel the "mistress of compassion" and "the JG Ballard of Birmingham...finding poetry and meaning where others see merely boredom and dereliction". [8]
Her third book, Mr. Lynch's Holiday, was published on 1 August 2013, and tells the story of an estranged father and son, both emigrants from their respective homelands, but for very different reasons. Meeting up in an unfinished (but largely abandoned) housing development in Spain, both are in search of a connection with themselves and each other. The novel garnered numerous favourable reviews for its "brilliant wit and warmth", [9] its "rare love story between a father and a son" [10] and its treatment of "the absurdities of the credit boom", [11] "excelling in exploring the strangeness of being the outsider and the stories people tell themselves to survive". [12]
In 2011 she contributed a short story "The Stickiness of Lime Trees" to an anthology supporting The Woodland Trust. The anthology - Why Willows Weep - has so far helped The Woodland Trust plant approximately 50,000 trees, and is to be re-released in paperback format in 2016.
Incomplete - to be updated
Joyce Carol Oates is an American writer. Oates published her first book in 1963, and has since published 58 novels, a number of plays and novellas, and many volumes of short stories, poetry, and non-fiction. Her novels Black Water (1992), What I Lived For (1994), and Blonde (2000), and her short story collections The Wheel of Love (1970) and Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories (2014) were each finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. She has won many awards for her writing, including the National Book Award, for her novel them (1969), two O. Henry Awards, the National Humanities Medal, and the Jerusalem Prize (2019).
Catherine Chidgey is a New Zealand novelist, short-story writer and university lecturer. Her honours include the inaugural Prize in Modern Letters; the Katherine Mansfield Fellowship to Menton, France; Best First Book at both the New Zealand Book Awards and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize ; the Acorn Foundation Fiction Prize at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards; and the Janet Frame Fiction Prize.
Emma Donoghue is an Irish-Canadian playwright, literary historian, novelist, and screenwriter. Her 2010 novel Room was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize and an international best-seller. Donoghue's 1995 novel Hood won the Stonewall Book Award and Slammerkin (2000) won the Ferro-Grumley Award for Lesbian Fiction. She is a 2011 recipient of the Alex Awards. Room was adapted by Donoghue into a film of the same name. For this, she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.
Shirley Hazzard was an Australian-American novelist, short story writer, and essayist. She was born in Australia and also held U.S. citizenship.
Helen Oyeyemi FRSL is a British novelist and writer of short stories.
Monica Elizabeth Jolley AO was an English-born Australian writer who settled in Western Australia in the late 1950s and forged an illustrious literary career there. She was 53 when her first book was published, and she went on to publish fifteen novels, four short story collections and three non-fiction books, publishing well into her 70s and achieving significant critical acclaim. She was also a pioneer of creative writing teaching in Australia, counting many well-known writers such as Tim Winton among her students at Curtin University.
The Guardian First Book Award was a literary award presented by The Guardian newspaper. It annually recognised one book by a new writer. It was established in 1999, replacing the Guardian Fiction Award or Guardian Fiction Prize that the newspaper had sponsored from 1965. The Guardian First Book Award was discontinued in 2016, with the 2015 awards being the last.
Nicole Krauss is an American author best known for her four novels Man Walks Into a Room (2002), The History of Love (2005), Great House (2010) and Forest Dark (2017), which have been translated into 35 languages. Her fiction has been published in The New Yorker, Harper's, Esquire, and Granta's Best American Novelists Under 40, and has been collected in Best American Short Stories 2003, Best American Short Stories 2008, Best American Short Stories 2019, and Best American Short Stories 2021. In 2011, Nicole Krauss won an award from the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards for Great House. A collection of her short stories, To Be a Man, was published in 2020 and won the Wingate Literary Prize in 2022.
Dame Hilary Mary Mantel, is a British writer whose work includes historical fiction, personal memoirs and short stories. Mantel has twice been awarded the Booker Prize, the first time for the 2009 novel Wolf Hall, a fictional account of Thomas Cromwell's rise to power in the court of Henry VIII, and secondly for the 2012 novel Bring Up the Bodies, the second instalment of the Cromwell trilogy. Mantel was the first woman and fourth person to receive the award twice, following in the footsteps of J. M. Coetzee, Peter Carey and J. G. Farrell. The third instalment of the trilogy, The Mirror & the Light, was released on 5 March 2020 in the UK and the following July was longlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize.
Canongate Books is an independent publishing firm based in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Heather O'Neill is a Canadian novelist, poet, short story writer, screenwriter and journalist, who published her debut novel, Lullabies for Little Criminals, in 2006. The novel was subsequently selected for the 2007 edition of Canada Reads, where it was championed by singer-songwriter John K. Samson. Lullabies won the competition. The book also won the Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction and was shortlisted for eight other major awards, including the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Governor General's Award and was longlisted for International Dublin Literary Award.
Tahmima Anam is a Bangladeshi-born British writer, novelist and columnist. Her first novel, A Golden Age (2007), was the Best First Book winner of the 2008 Commonwealth Writers' Prizes. Her follow-up novel, The Good Muslim, was nominated for the 2011 Man Asian Literary Prize. She is the granddaughter of Abul Mansur Ahmed and daughter of Mahfuz Anam.
The Guildford Arts Book Prize has been awarded annually for the best first novel by an author living anywhere in the UK, and announced at the Guildford Book Festival. Between 1998 and 2005 it was sponsored by Pendleton May and known as the Pendleton May First Novel Award, in 2006 by Goss & Co., and in 2007 by Jelf Group PLC, which had supported the award since its inception.
Anne Teresa Enright is an Irish writer. She has published seven novels, many short stories and a non-fiction work called Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood, about the birth of her two children. Her writing explores themes such as family, love, identity and motherhood.
What Was Lost is the 2007 début novel by Catherine O'Flynn. The novel is about a girl who goes missing in a shopping centre in 1984, and the people who try to discover what happened to her twenty years later. What Was Lost won the First Novel Award at the 2007 Costa Book Awards, and was short-listed for the overall Costa Book of the Year Award.
Lucy Caldwell is a Northern Irish playwright and novelist. She was the winner of the 2021 BBC National Short Story Award.
Nadifa Mohamed is a Somali-British novelist. She featured on Granta magazine's list "Best of Young British Novelists" in 2013, and in 2014 on the Africa39 list of writers aged under 40 with potential and talent to define future trends in African literature. Her 2021 novel, The Fortune Men, was shortlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize, making her the first British Somali novelist to get this honour. She has also written short stories, essays, memoirs and articles in outlets including The Guardian, and contributed poetry to the anthology New Daughters of Africa. She was also a lecturer in Creative Writing in the Department of English at Royal Holloway, University of London until 2021. She will be Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University in Spring 2022.
Susanna Mary Clarke is an English author known for her debut novel Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2004), a Hugo Award-winning alternative history. Clarke began Jonathan Strange in 1993 and worked on it during her spare time. For the next decade, she published short stories from the Strange universe, but it was not until 2003 that Bloomsbury bought her manuscript and began work on its publication. The novel became a best-seller.
Belinda McKeon is an Irish writer. She is the author of two novels, Solace, which won the 2011 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and Tender (2015).
Mandy Theresa O'Loughlin, known professionally as Kit de Waal, is a British/Irish writer. Her debut novel, My Name Is Leon, was published by Penguin Books in June 2016. After securing the publishing deal with Penguin, De Waal used some of her advance to set up the Kit de Waal Creative Writing Fellowship to help improve working-class representation in the arts. The audiobook version of My Name is Leon is voiced by Sir Lenny Henry. De Waal has also published short stories, including the collection Supporting Cast (2020).
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