Raphael
Selbourne

Raphael Selbourne was born in Oxford in 1968. After graduating in Politics at the University of Sussex, he moved to Italy where he lived for 10 years working mostly as a teacher and translator. He went to the West Midlands in 2004 to work with the long term unemployed, and has remained there ever since. In 2006 he interrupted an MA in Islamic Studies to start writing Beauty.

Beauty won the 2009 Costa First Novel Award. The judges described it as ‘pitch perfect on every level’ and as a novel which ‘captures the raw humanity of inner city life with extraordinary authenticity’. Beauty also won the McKitterick Prize, which is awarded to a first novel by an author over the age of 40, and was endowed by the late Tom McKitterick.