Beryl Bainbridge dies in London
2nd July 2010
British novelist Dame Beryl Bainbridge died in the early hours of this morning at the age of 75.
The author, whose works include The Dressmaker, The Bottle Factory Outing and Injury Time, was admitted to a London hospital last week after being diagnosed with cancer, her agent revealed.
Bainbridge was nominated for the Man Booker Prize five times but failed to ever clinch the award. She did, however, win the Whitbread novel award twice and took the Guardian fiction prize for The Bottle Factory Outing.
Speaking to the Guardian, biographer Michael Holroyd claimed the author was 'unique' and wrote with an 'absolutely original voice'.
He also said that despite sometimes consciously presenting herself as a 'clown', Bainbridge was always a 'committed novelist'.
Paying tribute in his Daily Telegraph blog, author Harry Mount lamented that Bainbridge's passing is a 'sad loss' for English literature.
'In a literary world that is inevitably prone to vanity, false modesty and obsessions with sales and advances, she was admirably free of all that,' he added.