The Offing
The Offing بقلم بينجامين مايرز ... An Observer Pick for 2019 One summer following the Second World War, Robert Appleyard sets out on foot from his Durham village. Sixteen and the son of a coal miner, he makes his way across the northern countryside until he reaches the former smuggling village of Robin Hood's Bay. There he meets Dulcie, an eccentric, worldly, older woman who lives in a ramshackle cottage facing out to sea. Staying with Dulcie, Robert's life opens into one of rich food, sea-swimming, sunburn and poetry. The two come from different worlds, yet as the summer months pass, they form an unlikely friendship that will profoundly alter their futures.
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![بينجامين مايرز ]()
بينجامين مايرز
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, The Perfect Golden Circle, was published in hardback in March 2022 by Bloomsbury Circus and will be available in paperback in 2023.
Myers’ novel, The Offing (2019), was a bestseller in the UK and Germany, where it has been 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 in development for adaptation.
His novel, The Gallows Pole (2017), won the Walter Scott Prize – the world’s biggest award for historical fiction – was the recipient of a Roger Deakin Award and has been adapted by director Shane Meadows for the BBC/A24. It was first published in the US / Canada in 2019 by Third Man Books, an imprint of Jack White’s Third Man Records.
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. 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). They are being 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 Benjamin Myers 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 was born in Durham, UK, in 1976 and currently lives in the Upper Calder Valley, West Yorkshire.