Benjamin Myers is an award-winning writer, whose work includes fiction, non-fiction, poetry and journalism. His work has been translated into ten languages.

 

His novels form a body of work that explores rural landscapes, mythology, history, marginalised characters, morality, class, nature, dialect and post-industrialisation. His most recent novel, Cuddy, is a bold and experimental retelling of the story of the hermit St. Cuthbert, unofficial patron saint of the North of England. The hardback edition was published by Bloomsbury in 2023 and won the Goldsmiths Prize.  

​

Moving and exhilarating, tender and slyly witty, The Perfect Golden Circle (2022) is a captivating novel set over the course of a burning hot summer. Featuring a Falklands veteran and New Age traveller, the two men set out nightly in a clapped-out camper van to undertake an extraordinary project. 

 

Myers’ novel, The Offing (2019), was a bestseller in the UK and Germany, where it was in the Top 10 for over two years, selling over 300,000 copies and chosen as the Independent Booksellers’ novel of 2020. It was serialised on BBC Radio 4’s ‘Book at Bedtime’ and is currently being adapted with Helena Bonham-Carter and director Jessica Hobbs.

 

His novel, The Gallows Pole (2017), won the Walter Scott Prize – the world’s biggest award for historical fiction – and received a Roger Deakin Award. It was adapted by director Shane Meadows for the BBC/A24. The book was first published by Bluemoose in the UK, a second edition was published by Bloomsbury. 

 

A short story collection, Male Tears (2021), was his debut collection of short stories and featured ‘The Folk Song Singer’ which was awarded the Tom-Gallon Prize in 2014 by the Society Of Authors, and ‘A Thousand Acres of English Soil’, the runner-up of the Tom-Gallon Prize in 2018.

 

A non-fiction work, Under The Rock, was published in 2018 and was shortlisted for the Portico Prize. It has been described as “a bold and original exploration of nature and literature that firmly establishes him firmly among the first ranks of Britain’s most exciting writers of landscape and place.” 

​​

Myers’ ‘folk crime’ novel Turning Blue (2016) was widely acclaimed by critics including Val McDermid and was followed by a sequel, These Darkening Days (2017). Both were republished by Raven Crime/Bloomsbury in 2022. 

​

His novel Beastings (2014) won the Portico Prize For Literature, was the recipient of the Northern Writers’ Award and longlisted for a Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Award 2015. Widely praised, it featured on several end of year lists, and was chosen by Robert Macfarlane in The Big Issue as one of his books of 2014.

​

Pig Iron (2012) was the winner of the inaugural Gordon Burn Prize. A controversial combination of biography and novel, based on the life of musician Richey Edwards, Richard (2010) was a bestseller and chosen as a Sunday Times book of the year.

​

As a journalist he has written for publications including New Statesman, The Guardian, The Spectator, Le Monde, NME, New Scientist, Mojo, The TLS and many more.

​

Myers has received support from the K Blundell Trust, the Royal Society Of Literature’s Brookleaze Grant and Arts Council England. He is a Fellow at the Royal Society of Literature. 

 

He was born in Durham, UK, in 1976 and currently lives in the Upper Calder Valley, West Yorkshire.

​