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

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His most recent novel, Jesus Christ Kinski, is a daring act of literary ventriloquism and a meditation on censorship, creativity and loneliness. It is currently in development as a stage adaptation and has been longlisted for the Jan Michaelski Prize 2026.

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Myers' previous novel, Rare Singles, is set in Scarborough over one Northern Soul weekender, while Cuddy is a bold and experimental retelling of the story of the hermit St Cuthbert, unofficial patron saint of the North of England. Published by Bloomsbury in 2023, it won the Goldsmiths Prize and the Winston Graham Prize and was shortlisted for the Ondaatje Prize.

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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. It is currently in development with Warp Films (This Is England, Four Lions, Dead Man’s Shoes) and Matriarch Productions (Adolescence, Boiling Point).

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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 was chosen as the Independent Booksellers’ novel of 2020. It was serialised on BBC Radio 4’s ‘Book at Bedtime’ and is currently being adapted for screen with Helena Bonham Carter and Catalyst Films.

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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, and a second edition was published by Bloomsbury. 

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A short story collection, Male Tears (2021), was Myers’ 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.

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A non-fiction work, Under the Rock, was published in 2018 and was shortlisted for the Portico Prize while his ‘folk crime’ novel Turning Blue (2016) was widely acclaimed by critics including Val McDermid and was followed by a sequel, These Darkening Days (2017).

 

Myers’ novel Beastings (2014) won the Portico Prize for Literature, was the recipient of the Northern Writers’ Award and was 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.

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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.

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

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