Portico Prize celebrates new talent
The winners of the 2008 Portico Prize for literature were announced on Thursday night (13 November) at an awards ceremony held at the Town Hall.
The prize celebrates the best of regional writing and for the first time this year included entries from the whole of the North of England.
Debut novelist Sallie Day was awarded the £4000 fiction prize for her novel Palace of Strange Girls, set in Blackpool in 1959.
Day fought off a distinguished shortlist that included David Peace’s critically acclaimed novel about Brian Clough’s controversial forty-four day spell as manager of Leeds United, The Damned United, and popular crime writer John Connor’s latest novel Falling.
Ex-documentary maker Catherine Bailey’s historical mystery Black Diamonds topped a strong non-fiction shortlist that included popular broadcaster Stuart Maconie’s Pies and Prejudice and Jenny Uglow’s Nature’s Engraver.
This year's guest speaker was Michael Schmidt, Professor of Poetry at Glasgow University, co-director of Manchester's Carcanet Press and champion of local and regional publishing.
The panel of judges included writer, photographer and musician Mike Harding, author and lecturer Paul Magrs and Manchester Libraries Co-ordinator Libby Tempest.
They were impressed by the exceptionally high standard of the entries this year, after a record 115 submissions, and praised the skill and craftsmanship of all the candidates
Published: Mon, 17 November, 2008
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