Gordon Burn Prize 2020

Jenn Ashworth was born in Preston and studied at Cambridge and Manchester. She is the author of the novels A Kind of Intimacy, Cold Light, The Friday Gospels, and Fell. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2018. Her latest book, Notes Made While Falling, is a memoir told in a series of essays published by Goldsmiths Press. She lectures in creative writing at Lancaster University.

Paul Mendez was born and raised in the Black Country. He now lives in London and is studying for an MA in Black British Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London. He has been a performing member of two theatre companies and worked as a voice actor. As a writer, he has contributed to the Times Literary Supplement and the Brixton Review of Books. Rainbow Milk is his debut novel.

Deborah Orr was an award-winning journalist, whose work regularly appeared in the Guardian, The Independent, The Sunday Times and in many magazines. She was the first female editor of the Guardian’s Weekend Magazine at the age of thirty. Deborah was a co-creator of ‘Enquirer’, a play commissioned by the National Theatre of Scotland and shortlisted for new play of the year in the Critics’ Awards for Theatre in Scotland.

Peter Pomersantsev is a Senior Fellow at the Institute of Global Affairs at LSE, studying 21^s century information manipulation and how to fix it. An author and TV producer, he is a widely-cited expert on disinformation and media and writes for publications including Granta, The Atlantic, Financial Times and many others. His first book Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, won the 2016 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize.

Lemn Sissay is a BAFTA-nominated, award-winning international writer and broadcaster. He has authored collections of poetry and plays. He has been made an Honorary Doctor by the universities of Manchester, Kent, Huddersfield and Brunel. Sissay was awarded an MBE for services to literature and in 2019 he was awarded the PEN Pinter Prize. He is Chancellor of the University of Manchester.

Lisa Taddeo spent eight years and thousands of hours tracking the women whose stories comprise Three Women, moving to the towns they lived in to better understand their lives. She has contributed to New York magazine, Esquire, Elle, Glamour and many other publications. Her short stories have won two Pushcart Prizes. She lives with her husband and daughter in New England.

David Keenan’s second novel plunges us into the dark night of Belfast in the 1970s: an era of military terrorism and sectarian violence, occult visions and religious intensity. Sammy and his friends enjoy drinking, wearing sharp clothes and the songs of Perry Como, and are uncompromising in what they’ll do to achieve their dream of a Free State. Through modernist prose, roughhouse vernacular and hallucinatory humour, this novel establishes David Keenan as a fearless literary stylist.

The novel follows a father and son as they travel across a nameless landscape in the wake of the father’s terminal diagnosis. As their story progresses, we discover more about the remarkable boy and his condition, and the love and understanding between a father and his child. Jesse Ball was named a Granta Best of Young American Novelists in 2017.

She has been nominated for many prizes including the CWA Gold Dagger and has won the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award twice. In addition to novels, Denise has also written plays and graphic novels including the graphic novel adaptation of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. In 2014, she was inducted into the Crime Writers’ Association Hall of Fame and was a judge for the Bailey’s Prize. She has also presented TV and radio programmes as well as appearing regularly in the media. She lives and works in Glasgow.

Twice shortlisted as BSME Magazine Writer of the Year, he has been Deputy Editor and Acting Editor of Esquire, Editor of Esquire Weekly, a Features Editor at the Mail on Sunday, Deputy Editor of Jack magazine, and a feature writer for the Guardian Guide, Live Magazine, The Journal on MrPorter.com and many others.

His first novel, The Wake, which won the Gordon Burn Prize 2014, was set during the Norman Conquest of England and written entirely in its own language – a version of Old English. Paul is also the co-founder of the Dark Mountain Project, an international network of writers, artists and thinkers which aims to challenge the stories our civilisation tells about itself.

Other works include Pig Iron (2012), which won the Gordon Burn Prize 2013 and Richard (2010), a bestseller chosen by the Sunday Times as one of its books of the year. His journalism, non-fiction and poetry have also been widely published. He lives in the Upper Calder Valley, West Yorkshire.