An Awfully Big Adventure

About the Author

Dame Beryl Bainbridge (1934-2010) was born in Liverpool, where she began her adult life working as an actress an experience she drew on later when writing An Awfully Big Adventure, later made into a 1995 film, directed by Mike Newell, starring Hugh Grant and Alan Rickman. Five of her seventeen novels were shortlisted for the Booker Prize, which garnered her the nickname 'the Booker Bridesmaid'; in 2011, a special Man Booker 'Best-of Beryl' Prize was awarded in her honour. Master Georgie (1998) won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and both Injury Time (1977) and Every Man for Himself (1996) were awarded the Whitbread Novel of the Year Prize. Also a talented painter, she lived for many years in a house crammed with eccentric Victoriania in London's Camden Town, where visitors were forced to squeeze past the stuffed buffalo in her entrance hall.

Yiyun Li is the author of several works of fiction, including most recently Wednesday's Child, The Book of Goose, and Where Reasons End, and the memoirs Things in Nature Merely Grow and Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life. She is the recipient of many awards, including a PEN/Faulkner Award, a PEN/Malamud Award, a PEN/Hemingway Award, a PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, a MacArthur Fellowship, and a Windham-Campbell Prize, and she was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, A Public Space, The Best American Short Stories, and The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, among other publications. She teaches at Princeton University and lives in Princeton, New Jersey.