Benjamin Myers was born in Durham, UK, in 1976.
He is an award-winning author and journalist. His next book The Gallows Pole will be published in May 2017. It is the recipient of Roger Deakin Award
Myers’ recent book was the ‘folk crime’ novel Turning Blue, widely acclaimed by critics including Val McDermid. A sequel is forthcoming.
His novel Beastings (2014) won the Portico Prize For Literature, was the recipient of the Northern Writers’ Award and longlisted for a Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Award 2015. Widely praised, it featured on several end of year lists, and was chosen by Robert Macfarlane in The Big Issue as one of his books of 2014.
Pig Iron (2012) was the winner of the inaugural Gordon Burn Prize and runner-up in The Guardian’s Not The Booker Prize. A controversial combination of biography and novel, Richard (2010) was a bestseller, chosen as a Sunday Times book of the year and optioned for film.
Myers’ short story ‘The Folk Song Singer’ was awarded the Tom-Gallon Prize in 2014 by the Society Of Authors, was published by Galley Beggar Press and has been performed by actors.
His recent (and forthcoming) novels form a series of works, each of which is set in a different county of northern England, and are heavily inspired by rural landscapes, mythology, marginalised characters, morality, class, nature, dialect and post-industrialisation.
As a journalist he has written about music, the arts and nature for publications including New Statesman, The Guardian, NME, Mojo, Time Out, New Scientist, Caught By The River, Record Collector, The Morning Star, Vice, The Quietus, Melody Maker, Metal Hammer, Prog, Q, Arena, Bizarre, Shortlist, Uncut, Alternative Press, Kerrang!, 3:AM Magazine, Prog, Careless Talk Costs Lives, Plan B and others.
His short stories and poetry have appeared in dozens of print and small press anthologies, chapbooks and underground obscurities. His work as been dramatised, set to music, exhibited alongside photographs and as a film/audio installation in venues including Durham Cathedral, The Bronte Parsonage, Hadrian’s Wall and The Portico Library. In 2016 he and his work were the subject of a film on BBC1’s Countryfile.
Myers has received support from the K Blundell Trust, the Royal Society Of Literature’s Brookleaze Grant and Arts Council England. In 2017 he was selected as writer for the International Literature Showcase.
He currently lives in the Upper Calder Valley, West Yorkshire.
For all book-related enquiries please contact Jessica Woollard at David Higham Associates.
Portrait by Julian Germain for the exhibition On Seeing The Author (2014).
Photo by Kevin McGonnell
The Portico Prize For Fiction/Poetry shortlist and judges, from left to right: Katrina Porteous, Michael Symmonds Roberts, Val McDermid (host), Alan Garner, Benjamin Myers, Joe Stretch (judge), Andrew Biswell (judge), Toby Martinez de las Rivas, Rebecca Goss.
With AL Kennedy.
With David Peace and members of the Gordon Burn Trust and New Writing North.
Contact sheet, circa 2003. Photos by Scarlet Page.
