Benjamin Myers had a lucky break with his 2017 novel, The Gallows Pole. First published by a small indie press, it won the Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction, garnered a two-book deal from Bloomsbury and this year is to be adapted by Shane Meadows as a BBC television series.
It’s a humble orphan girl, not one of the Lindisfarne monks, who is given a vision of Durham cathedral
He is something of a maverick – his work a mix of Hughesian lyricism and noir violence – and his success has been hard won. He has been working the literary coal face for almost 20 years, trying every kind of genre while knocking on publishers’ doors and finding them shut. He responded with a new literary movement, the Brutalists – its manifesto: ‘Young, hungry and rejected by the mainstream.’
Bloomsbury has changed all that; and now here he is with Cuddy, a whacking 400-page experimental novel.
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