Nell Dunn – författare

THE BESTSELLING NOVEL BY NELL DUNN''Her art is ignited by voice . . . as you hear it, is unquestionable'' ALI SMITH, GUARDIAN ''Touching, truthful and fresh'' MARGARET DRABBLE ''Nell Dunn''s hilarious, heartbreaking Poor Cow, about a single mother in sixties London'' PARIS REVIEW Joy - also called Blossom, Sunshine and Blondie by the men in her life - walks down Fulham Broadway carrying her week-old baby, Jonny. She is twenty-one with bleached hair, high suede shoes and a head full of dreams. Her husband Tom is a thief and on the proceeds of a job they move to a luxury flat - ''the world was our oyster and we chose Ruislip''. Then Tom is sent to prison, leaving Joy and Jonny to move in with Auntie Emm. This is Joy''s story: an exuberant, pink-lipsticked, tale of London life, love and young motherhood in the sixties . . . Poor Cow explores the life of a young working-class girl in the swinging sixties as she navigates the consequences of her decisions. Nell Dunn''s 1967 novel was also made into a film directed by Ken Loach.

WINNER OF THE JOHN LLEWELLYN RHYS MEMORIAL PRIZE ''Her art is ignited by voice, as you hear it, is unquestionable'' ALI SMITH, GUARDIAN ''Distinctive, pared-down style'' DAVID EVANS, INDEPENDENT ''Unflinching look at the lives of working-class women'' DAILY MAIL Nell Dunn''s scenes of London life, as it was lived in the early Sixties in the industrial slums of Battersea, have few parallels in contemporary writing. The exuberant, uninhibited, disparate world she found in the tired old streets and under the railway arches is recaptured in these closely linked sketches; and the result is pure alchemy. In this novel, we witness clip-joint hustles, petty thieving, candid sexual encounters, casual birth and casual death. She has a superb gift for capturing colloquial speech and the characters observed in these pages convey that caustic, ironic, and compassionate feeling for life, in which a turn of phrase frequently contains startling flashes of poetry. Battersea, that teeming wasteland of brick south of the Thames, has found its poet in Nell Dunn and Up the Junction is her touchingly truthful and timeless testimonial to it.