I grew up on a suburban street with lace curtains and dull neighbours, so I made up stories to tell my friend, in which they became serial killers and burglars. She told her mother, who then told mine.

Other awards runners up
1987 Shortlisted for the Booker Prize – Circles of Deceit
1995 Shortlisted for the WH Smith Mind-Boggling Book Award – The Real Plato Jones
1996 Shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal – Granny the Pag


List of works


See also

List of winners and shortlisted authors of the Booker Prize for Fiction


Notes. In 2002 Bawden was badly injured in the Potters Bar rail crash in which her husband Austen Kark was killed. Her mother was a teacher and her father a member of the Royal Marines.

She is one of a select group to have both served as a Booker judge and made the shortlist as an author. Nina Bawden CBE FRSL JP (19 January 1925 – 22 August 2012) was a British novelist and children's writer. She was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1987 and the Lost Man Booker Prize in 2010.