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Bookseller beats leading authors to win £5,000 literature prize
Louise Jury, Chief Arts Correspondent1 Dec 2009
A bookshop assistant who distributed her own novel has beaten Booker and Orange prize winners to an international literary award.
Evie Wyld, 29, defeated rivals including Aravind Adiga, who took the Man Booker last year, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the Orange Prize victor two years ago, to take the £5,000 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for best work of literature by a UK or Commonwealth writer aged 35 or under.
She believes she has sold fewer than a thousand copies of her debut novel, After the Fire, A Still Small Voice, although sales were boosted when she personally delivered a copy to about 30 independent London bookshops.
"I know how important it is to have some reason why a particular book stands out," she said.
About 200 have been sold through the shop, Review, in Peckham, where she works part-time to support her writing. She was thrilled simply to be on a list alongside leading authors. "To think that I might be next to these people in a list is really exciting," she said. Working in a bookshop was a salutary lesson in seeing how tough the book market was, she added.
Ms Wyld, who grew up in Peckham but now lives in Camberwell, originally wanted to be a painter but studied creative writing as well as art at Bath Spa University where she realised she was a better writer.
A shop of a different kind proved the inspiration for her winning novel, the story of two Australian men struggling to come to terms with the effects of war and violence upon their lives. It features a cake shop based on one in which her own mother grew up in Sydney, Australia.
Louise Doughty, chairwoman of the judges, said: "She writes brilliantly, able to paint a picture or create a convincing encounter with a few deft, evocative strokes, in a prose style worthy of our very best writers. There is nothing first- novelish about this first novel."
