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Dame Beryl Margaret Bainbridge DBE, was a Liverpudlian writer primarily known for her works of psychological fiction, often macabre tales set among the English working class.
She enjoyed writing and by the age of 10 she was keeping a diary.
Everything else you grow out of, but you never recover from childhood.
Her first novel, Harriet Said..., was rejected by several publishers, one of whom found the central characters repulsive almost beyond belief.
Her second (A Weekend with Claude, 1967) and third (Another Part of the Wood, 1968) novels were well received by critics although they failed to earn much money.
What we remember is probably fiction anyway.
She wrote and published seven more novels during the 1970s, of which the fifth, Injury Time, was awarded the Whitbread prize for best novel in 1977.
In the late 1970s, she wrote a screenplay based on her novel Sweet William. The resulting film, starring Sam Waterston, was released in 1980.
From 1980 onwards, eight more novels appeared. The 1989 novel, An Awfully Big Adventure, was adapted into a film in 1995, starring Alan Rickman and Hugh Grant.
She won the Whitbread Awards prize for best novel in 1977 and 1996, she was also nominated for the Booker Prize five times.
The prize I value most was given to me 60 years ago. I was named the girl with the cleanest fingernails.
I am of the firm belief that everybody could write books and I never understand why they don't. After all, everybody speaks. Once the grammar has been learnt it is simply talking on paper and in time learning what not to say.
In the 1990s, Bainbridge turned to historical fiction. These novels continued to be popular with critics, but this time, were also commercially successful. Among her historical fiction novels are Every Man for Himself, about the 1912 Titanic disaster, for which Bainbridge won the 1996 Whitbread Awards prize for best novel and Master Georgie, set during the Crimean War, for which she won the 1998 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction.
Her final novel, According to Queeney, is a fictionalised account of the last years of the life of Samuel Johnson as seen through the eyes of Queeney Thrale, eldest daughter of Henry and Hester Thrale.
In 2000, she was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE).
The older one becomes the quicker the present fades into sepia and the past looms up in glorious technicolour.
In 2008, The Times named Bainbridge on their list of The 10 greatest British writers since 1945.
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