2000 – Wide Open

Winner of the 2000 Award

2000 Shortlist     2000 Longlist

From the Judges’ Citation

Wide Open is word perfect, witty and ironic…..The author’s focus on marginal lives and on the importance of the dispossesed and the apparently mad persuade us finally that Wide Open possesses a manic energy and taut eloquence worthy of a large, serious and global readership.

Judges: Alicia Borinsky, David Dabydeen, Suzi Feay, Josyane Savigneau, Colm Toibín. Non-voting Chair, Allen Weinstein

About the Book

Fifty miles to the south and east of London, poking out into the estuary of the river Thames, the Isle of Sheppey is a forgotten, misty backwater. There’s a prison, some wading birds and a small nudist beach. In front of this salty, blasted backdrop, Nicola Barker conjures up an imaginative landscape of breathtaking scope and audacity.

About the Author

Nicola Barker was born in 1966. She lives and works in Hackney, London. She is the author of two collections of stories, Love Your Enemies (winner of the David Highman Prize for Fiction and joint winner of the Macmillan Silver Award for Fiction) and Heading Inland (winner of the Mail on Sunday John Llewellyn Rhys Prize), and two other novels, Reversed Forecast and Small Holdings.