Benjamin Myers – författare

**SOON TO BE A MAJOR FILM STARRING HELENA BONHAM-CARTER**FROM THE WALTER SCOTT PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR OF THE GALLOWS POLE COMES A POWERFUL NEW NOVELA TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR_______________________‘What a radical thing, these days, to have written a book so full of warmth and kindness ... Gorgeous’ - Max Porter, author of Lanny‘Glorious ... Leaves an indelible impression ... A moving and subtle novel in many ways, infused with a love of the minute pleasures in life, and the lasting regrets’ – Scotland on Sunday_______________________One summer following the Second World War, Robert Appleyard sets out on foot from his Durham village. Sixteen and the son of a coal miner, he makes his way across the northern countryside until he reaches the former smuggling village of Robin Hood’s Bay. There he meets Dulcie, an eccentric, worldly, older woman who lives in a ramshackle cottage facing out to sea.Staying with Dulcie, Robert’s life opens into one of rich food, sea-swimming, sunburn and poetry. The two come from different worlds, yet as the summer months pass, they form an unlikely friendship that will profoundly alter their futures._______________________An i Book of the YearA Reading Agency Book of the YearA BBC Radio 2 Book Club PickA BBC Radio 4 'Book at Bedtime'An Observer Pick for 2019

A warm, tender and funny story about unlikely friendships, second chances, and the magic of soul music **Selected as a book of 2024 by the Guardian, New Statesman and Good Housekeeping**'A book of rare charm by a writer who understands the magic of music' Ian Rankin'An entertaining tale of grit, fecklessness and Northern Soul' Daily Telegraph'The book you didn't know you need' Bobby Palmer'A tale of soul music and second chances' Guardian'The laureate of friendship, a chronicler of unexpected, transformative connection' Wendy Erskine'A meditation on grief, love, and the redemptive power of music' Observer____________________________________Dinah has always lived in Scarborough. Trapped with her feckless husband and useless son, her one release comes at her town’s Northern Soul nights, where she gets to put on her best and lose herself in the classics.Dinah has an especial hero: Bucky Bronco, who recorded a string of soul gems in the late Sixties and then vanished off the face of the earth. When she manages to contact Bucky she can’t believe her luck.Over in Chicago, Bucky Bronco is down on his luck – and has been since the loss of his beloved wife Maybelle. The best he can hope for is to make ends meet, and try and stay high.But then an unexpected invitation arrives, from someone he’s never met, to come to somewhere he’s never heard of. With nothing to lose – and in need of the cash – Bucky boards a plane.And so Bucky finds himself in rainy Scarborough, where everyone seems to know who is – preparing to play for an audience for the first time in nearly half a century. Over the course of the week, he finds himself striking up new and unexpected friendships; and facing his past, and its losses, for the very first time.'A writer who continues to build a rich and bold body of work on his own terms' Ronán HessionWise, hilarious and profound, Rare Singles is an unforgettable story about the power of music and friendship to bring us back to ourselves.

This is an introduction to the thought of one of the most fascinating theologians and at the same time most controversial church leaders of our time. In contemporary theology, the work of Rowan Williams is virtually without parallel for its extraordinary diversity and complexity. His writings span the genres of poetry, history, literary criticism, spirituality, theology, ethics, and philosophy - yet this diverse body of work is apparently not unified by any overarching system or agenda. Indeed, one of the hallmarks of Williams' thought is a vigorous refusal of completeness and systematic closure. Nevertheless, this book will argue that the complex body of Williams' work is held together by a specific theological construal both of Christian language and of the church's founding event.

This is an introduction to the thought of one of the most fascinating theologians and at the same time most controversial church leaders of our time. In contemporary theology, the work of Rowan Williams is virtually without parallel for its extraordinary diversity and complexity. His writings span the genres of poetry, history, literary criticism, spirituality, theology, ethics, and philosophy - yet this diverse body of work is apparently not unified by any overarching system or agenda. Indeed, one of the hallmarks of Williams' thought is a vigorous refusal of completeness and systematic closure. Nevertheless, this book will argue that the complex body of Williams' work is held together by a specific theological construal both of Christian language and of the church's founding event.

November, 1971. Berlin, Germany. Opening night. Klaus Kinski, Germany’s most controversial actor, steps into the spotlight to a crowd of thousands.After years of making movies abroad, he has returned to the stage for a much-publicized one-man performance about Jesus Christ. As the crowd turn on him and violence is threatened, it is also very nearly his last. After this week, he will never perform on stage again.Exactly fifty years later, a hypochondriac writer, housebound by winter snowstorms, becomes fixated with video footage of Kinski at his most manic. In this forensic analysis, he strays into the darker corners of modern culture, and finally begins to understand the compulsive urge that drives artists to the edge of sanity in their pursuit of perfection.Jesus Christ Kinski is a novel about a film about a performance about Jesus. It is a daring act of literary ventriloquism, a meditation on censorship, creativity, loneliness – and just how far our tolerance is tested by bad people who make great art.

____________________The inspiration for the BBC TV series, directed by Shane Meadows and starring Tom Burke, George MacKay and Thomas TurgooseWINNER OF THE 2018 WALTER SCOTT PRIZE____________________‘Powerful, visceral writing, historical fiction at its best. Benjamin Myers is one to watch’ - Pat Barker‘Phenomenal’ - Sebastian Barry‘Superb’ - The Times____________________From his remote moorland home, David Hartley assembles a gang of weavers and land-workers to embark upon a criminal enterprise that will capsize the economy and become the biggest fraud in British history. They are the Cragg Vale Coiners and their business is ‘clipping’ – the forging of coins, a treasonous offence punishable by death. When an excise officer vows to bring them down and with the industrial age set to change the face of England forever, Hartley’s empire begins to crumble. Forensically assembled, The Gallows Pole is a true story of resistance and a rarely told alternative history of the North.____________________'One of my books of the year … It’s the best thing Myers has done' - Robert Macfarlane, Big Issue Books of the Year

WINNER OF THE GORDON BURN PRIZEAn unflinching portrait of contemporary Traveller culture by the award-winning author of The Gallows PoleJohn-John wants to escape his past. But the legacy of brutality left by his boxer father, King of the Gypsies, Mac Wisdom, overshadows his life. His new job as an ice cream man should offer freedom, but instead pulls him into the dark recesses of a northern town where his family name is mud. When he attempts to trade prejudice and parole officers for the solace of the rural landscape, Mac’s bloody downfall threatens John-John’s very survival.

Winner of the Portico Prize for Literature and the Northern Writers’ Award‘A brilliant, brutal novel’ ROBERT MACFARLANEA girl and a baby. A priest and a poacher. A savage pursuit through the landscape of a changing rural England. When a teenage girl leaves the workhouse and abducts a child placed in her care, the local priest is called upon to retrieve them. Chased through the Cumbrian mountains of a distant past, the girl fights starvation and the elements, encountering the hermits, farmers and hunters who occupy the remote hillside communities. An American Southern Gothic tale set against the violent beauty of Northern England, Beastings is a sparse and poetic novel about morality, motherhood and corruption.

'One of the most singular, moving and crucial voices of our times' David PeaceIn Male Tears, a debut collection of stories that brings together over fifteen years of work, Benjamin Myers lays bare the male psyche in all its fragility, complexity and failure, its hubris and forbidden tenderness. Farmers, fairground workers and wandering pilgrims, gruesome gamekeepers, bare-knuckle boxers and ex-cons with secret passions, the men that populate these unsettling, wild and wistful stories form a multi-faceted, era-spanning portrait of just what it means to be a man.

'In this folksy, magnetic tale, two outsiders seek healing and enlightenment by creating crop formations in a Wiltshire field ... A memorable hymn to beauty' OBSERVER'The pleasures of this bountiful novel are like a glass of cool water on a parched summer day' THE TIMESEngland, 1989. Over the course of a burning hot summer, two very different men – traumatized Falklands veteran Calvert, and affable, chaotic Redbone – set out nightly in a clapped-out camper van to undertake an extraordinary project. Under cover of darkness, the two men traverse the fields of rural England in secret, forming crop circles in elaborate and mysterious patterns. As the summer wears on, and their designs grow ever more ambitious, the two men find that their work has become a cult international sensation – and that an unlikely and beautiful friendship has taken root as the wheat ripens from green to gold.

**Winner of the Goldsmiths Prize 2023****Winner of the Winston Graham Historical Prize****Shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize****Chosen as a book of the year 2023 by The Times, Guardian, Telegraph and New Statesman**‘An epic the north has long deserved’ FINANCIAL TIMES ‘A sensational piece of storytelling … A singular and significant achievement’ GUARDIAN‘Marvellous, artful, enchanted’ DAILY TELEGRAPH'Cements Myers’s standing as one of our finest, and most deftly imaginative, writers' I NEWSThe triumphant new novel from the Walter Scott Prize-winning author of The Gallows Pole and The OffingCuddy is a bold and experimental retelling of the story of the hermit St. Cuthbert, unofficial patron saint of the North of England.Incorporating poetry, prose, play, diary and real historical accounts to create a novel like no other, Cuddy straddles historical eras - from the first Christian-slaying Viking invaders of the holy island of Lindisfarne in the 8th century to a contemporary England defined by class and austerity.Along the way we meet brewers and masons, archers and academics, monks and labourers, their visionary voices and stories echoing through their ancestors and down the ages.And all the while at the centre sits Durham Cathedral and the lives of those who live and work around this place of pilgrimage – their dreams, desires, connections and communities.

‘Ben Myers is the master of English rural noir, and with Turning Blue, he has created a whole new genre: folk crime … this is by turns gripping, ghastly and unputdownable’ PAUL KINGSNORTHIn the depths of winter in an isolated Yorkshire hamlet, a teenage girl, Melanie Muncy, is missing.The elite detective unit Cold Storage dispatches its best man to investigate. DI Jim Brindle may be obsessive, taciturn and solitary, but nobody on the force is more relentless in pursuing justice. Local journalist Roddy Mace has sacrificed a high-flying career as a reporter in London to take up a role with the local newspaper. For him the Muncy case offers the chance of redemption.Darker forces are at work than either man has realised. On a farm high above the hamlet, Steven Rutter, a destitute loner, harbours secrets that will shock even the hardened Brindle. Nobody knows the bleak moors and their hiding places better than him.As Brindle and Mace begin to prise the secrets of the case from the tight-lipped locals, their investigation leads first to the pillars of the community and finally to a local celebrity who has his own hiding places, and his own dark tastes.

As autumn draws in, a series of unexplained vicious attacks occur in a small northern town renowned for being a bohemian backwater.As the national media descends, local journalist Roddy Mace attempts to tell the story, but finds the very nature of truth brought into question. He turns to disgraced detective James Brindle for help.When further attacks occur the shattered community becomes the focus of an accelerating media that favours immediacy over truth. Murder and myth collide in a folk-crime story about place, identity and the tangled lives of those who never leave.

A bold and brilliant short work by the author of the Goldsmiths Prize-winning Cuddy**LONGLISTED FOR THE JAN MICHALSKI PRIZE 2026**‘Myers’ intense, double-edged fiction reminds us again of how exciting the novel can be’ Observer‘Makes most contemporary fiction look bloodless by comparison’ Daily Mail‘Like nothing else you’ll read this year’ Jan Carson‘Highly original, bold, inventive … A stunning rendering’ independent.co.uk‘A hair-raising performance’ Kit Fan‘Brilliant, strange and electrifying’ Daily TelegraphNovember, 1971. Berlin, Germany. Opening night. Klaus Kinski, Germany’s most controversial actor, steps into the spotlight to a crowd of thousands.After years of making movies abroad, he has returned to the stage for a much-publicized one-man performance about Jesus Christ. As the crowd turn on him and violence is threatened, it is also very nearly his last. After this week, he will never perform on stage again.Exactly fifty years later, a hypochondriac writer, housebound by winter snowstorms, becomes fixated with video footage of Kinski at his most manic. In this forensic analysis, he strays into the darker corners of modern culture, and finally begins to understand the compulsive urge that drives artists to the edge of sanity in their pursuit of perfection.Jesus Christ Kinski is a novel about a film about a performance about Jesus. It is a daring act of literary ventriloquism, a meditation on censorship, creativity, loneliness – and just how far our tolerance is tested by bad people who make great art.Praise for Benjamin Myers‘One of our finest, and most deftly imaginative, writers’ i news ‘Radical and gorgeous’ Max Porter‘A writer of extraordinary and incandescent talent’ Alex Preston

A warm, tender and funny story about unlikely friendships, second chances, and the magic of soul music **Selected as a book of 2024 by the Guardian, New Statesman and Good Housekeeping**'A book of rare charm by a writer who understands the magic of music' Ian Rankin'An entertaining tale of grit, fecklessness and Northern Soul' Daily Telegraph'The book you didn't know you need' Bobby Palmer'A tale of soul music and second chances' Guardian'The laureate of friendship, a chronicler of unexpected, transformative connection' Wendy Erskine'A meditation on grief, love, and the redemptive power of music' Observer____________________________________Dinah has always lived in Scarborough. Trapped with her feckless husband and useless son, her one release comes at her town’s Northern Soul nights, where she gets to put on her best and lose herself in the classics.Dinah has an especial hero: Bucky Bronco, who recorded a string of soul gems in the late Sixties and then vanished off the face of the earth. When she manages to contact Bucky she can’t believe her luck.Over in Chicago, Bucky Bronco is down on his luck – and has been since the loss of his beloved wife Maybelle. The best he can hope for is to make ends meet, and try and stay high.But then an unexpected invitation arrives, from someone he’s never met, to come to somewhere he’s never heard of. With nothing to lose – and in need of the cash – Bucky boards a plane.And so Bucky finds himself in rainy Scarborough, where everyone seems to know who is – preparing to play for an audience for the first time in nearly half a century. Over the course of the week, he finds himself striking up new and unexpected friendships; and facing his past, and its losses, for the very first time.'A writer who continues to build a rich and bold body of work on his own terms' Ronán HessionWise, hilarious and profound, Rare Singles is an unforgettable story about the power of music and friendship to bring us back to ourselves.

A warm, tender and funny story about unlikely friendships, second chances, and the magic of soul music **Selected as a book of 2024 by the Guardian, New Statesman and Good Housekeeping**'A book of rare charm by a writer who understands the magic of music' Ian Rankin'An entertaining tale of grit, fecklessness and Northern Soul' Daily Telegraph'The book you didn't know you need' Bobby Palmer'A tale of soul music and second chances' Guardian'The laureate of friendship, a chronicler of unexpected, transformative connection' Wendy Erskine'A meditation on grief, love, and the redemptive power of music' Observer____________________________________Dinah has always lived in Scarborough. Trapped with her feckless husband and useless son, her one release comes at her town’s Northern Soul nights, where she gets to put on her best and lose herself in the classics.Dinah has an especial hero: Bucky Bronco, who recorded a string of soul gems in the late Sixties and then vanished off the face of the earth. When she manages to contact Bucky she can’t believe her luck.Over in Chicago, Bucky Bronco is down on his luck – and has been since the loss of his beloved wife Maybelle. The best he can hope for is to make ends meet, and try and stay high.But then an unexpected invitation arrives, from someone he’s never met, to come to somewhere he’s never heard of. With nothing to lose – and in need of the cash – Bucky boards a plane.And so Bucky finds himself in rainy Scarborough, where everyone seems to know who is – preparing to play for an audience for the first time in nearly half a century. Over the course of the week, he finds himself striking up new and unexpected friendships; and facing his past, and its losses, for the very first time.'A writer who continues to build a rich and bold body of work on his own terms' Ronán HessionWise, hilarious and profound, Rare Singles is an unforgettable story about the power of music and friendship to bring us back to ourselves.

**Shortlisted for the Portico Prize 2019**The astonishing new work of non-fiction from the prize-winning author of The Gallows Pole and The OffingUnder the Rock is about badgers, balsam, history, nettles, mythology, moorlands, mosses, poetry, bats, wild swimming, slugs, recession, floods, logging, peacocks, community, apples, asbestos, quarries, geology, industrial music, owls, stone walls, farming, anxiety, relocation, the North, woodpiles, folklore, landslides, ruins, terriers, woodlands, ravens, dales, valleys, walking, animal skulls, trespassing, crows, factories, maps, rain - lots of rain - and a great big rock.______________'Extraordinary, elemental ... never less than compelling: this is a wild, dark grimoire of a book' - TLS'Exceptionally engaging ... beguiling ... this is a startling, unclassifiable book' - Stuart Kelly, The Scotsman'Compelling ... admirable and engrossing. Myers writes of the rain with a poet's eye worthy of Hughes' - Erica Wagner, New Statesman'A bone-tingling book' - Richard Benson, author of The Valley and The Farm'A truly elemental read from which I emerged subtly changed... It has all the makings of a classic' - Miriam Darlington, author of Otter Country and Owl Sense

At the centre of John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost (1667) is a radical commitment to divine and human freedom. This study situates Paradise Lost within the context of post-Reformation theological controversy, and pursues the theological portrayal of freedom as it unfolds throughout the poem. The study identifies and explores the ways in which Milton is both continuous and discontinuous with the major post-Reformation traditions in his depiction of predestination, creation, free will, sin, and conversion. Milton’s deep commitment to freedom is shown to underlie his appropriation and creative transformation of a wide range of existing theological concepts.