ALAN Garner, Jenny Uglow, Rebecca Goss and Michael Symmons Roberts are among the writers nominated for the 2015 Portico Prize for Literature, the North’s leading literary award, celebrating its 30th anniversary and established by the Manchester-based Georgian Portico Library.
In a surprise outcome, four of the books shortlisted in the fiction category are collections of poetry
The Portico Prize is biennially awarded to the highest quality books set wholly or mainly in the North of England and is supported by the Arts Council England and The Zochonis Charitable Trust.
One winner each in the categories of fiction (including poetry) and non-fiction receives £10,000.
Winners will be announced at a gala awards dinner at the Mercure Manchester Piccadilly Hotel on Thursday 26 November .
In a surprise outcome, four of the books shortlisted in the fiction category are collections of poetry, a first for the Prize, and a welcome fillip for the Portico’s newly introduced programme of poetry-related events.
Rebecca Goss has made the shortlist for her moving collection of poems about the short life and death of her daughter Ella. Her Birth was shortlisted for the 2013 Forward Prize for the best collection and longlisted for the 2015 Warwick Prize for Writing.
The Portico (credit: esmic)The other shortlisted poets are Toby Martinez de las Rivas’s Terror, poems set against landscapes of the North East. Katrina Porteous’s Two Countries is a book of poems about place: landscape, community, and the shifting, provisional relations between them. Michael Symmons Roberts’s Drysalter completes the poetry line-up. The fiction shortlist also includes Alan Garner’s hauntingly provoking Boneland, the conclusion to an unintentional trilogy that began with The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and The Moon of Gomrath, and the final selection, award-winning novelist Benjamin Myers’s Beastings, a novel which disturbs and hypnotises at the same time.
In the non-fiction category Jenny Uglow, who won the Portico Prize in 1993 with Elizabeth Gaskell, A Habit of Stories, has been nominated for The Pinecone, a biography of Sara Losh, heiress, architect and visionary. Richard Benson’s The Valley was shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize and was a Radio 4 Book of the Week in April 2014. One year later James Rebanks’ widely acclaimed A Shepherd’s Life also featured as the Radio 4’s Book of the Week and both have made the Portico Prize non-fiction shortlist. Rebanks, whose Twitterfeed ‘The Herdwick Shepherd’ has a strong following, is the son of a shepherd and he and his family have lived and worked in and around the Lake District for generations.
Rob Cowen, acclaimed nature and travel writer, turns his focus to an uncelebrated landscape in his new book, Common Ground, and the final book in this shortlist is The Last Act of Love by Cathy Rentzenbrink, a tragic yet uplifting testament to a family's survival and the price we pay for love.
The non-fiction shortlist was drawn up by a panel of judges that includes the acclaimed historian Professor Michael Wood; ex Albertos’ ukulele-playing singer, writer and broadcaster CP Lee and journalist Neil Sowerby. The fiction/poetry judges were poet and priest Rachel Mann, novelist Joe Stretch, and former Portico Prize Winner and director of the International Anthony Burgess Foundation Professor Andrew Biswell.
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