This place must have been built by brilliant minds and fuelled by a faith in something bigger, a form of faith that he now wishes he too might experience. I want to ask you what’s next but I also don’t want to, as with Ben Myers the surprise is part of the joy of reading. So, if not what’s next, perhaps what’s the book you’d write if there were no limits? The one that makes you think, “Could I?”.

Cuddy is a book told through four connected novels, plus an interlude, at different key moments throughout the history of Durham Cathedral and its founding as a home for the relics of St Cuthbert. (Although the choice of 1827 for one part also allows an implicit dig at Liz Truss!) Myers’ short story ‘The Folk Song Singer’ was awarded the Tom-Gallon Prize in 2014 by the Society Of Authors and published by Galley Beggar Press. His short stories and poetry have appeared in dozens of anthologies. In 2014 Myers won the Society of Author's Tom-Gallon Trust Award [22] for his short story, 'The Folk Song Singer'. He was runner-up in the same prize in 2018 for his story 'A Thousand Acres Of English Soil'. His poem 'The Path To Pendle Hill' was selected by New Statesman as one of its Poems Of The Year 2015 [23] and work from the same collection were read by Myers on BBC1 programme Countryfile. Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin, because it’s near-perfect, and Ask Dr Mueller: The Writings of Cookie Mueller because it contains dirt, humour and wisdom. I read the masterful Happy Like Murderers by Gordon Burn twice. Then I was asked to write a new foreword but had to construct it from memory. It’s the best British true crime account, but I couldn’t step into the world of Fred and Rose West a third time. There’s also a Booker-longlisted title that was so bad I still get angry when I think about it. Writerly loyalty forbids me from naming it.

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BENJAMIN: Well – world exclusive here – Shane Meadows’ adaptation is, in fact, more of a prequel to The Gallows Pole, so it is very different to the novel. The first time I met him, I told him that the story wasn’t even mine in the first place – it was merely my version of real events, real history – and now it would become ‘ The Gallows Pole by Shane Meadows’, and he should feel free to do whatever he wants with it. Shane is a true auteur, he has a singular vision, and he has taken it off in a new direction. Cuddy is a bold and experimental retelling of the story of the hermit St. Cuthbert, unofficial patron saint of the North of England.

I admit I was a little daunted by the style when I first started but then Gallows Pole unnerved me to begin with. All in all a fabulous book one I would hope would appear on prize lists such as the Booker prize .The book defiantly classes as a literary novel From life in a brutal eighteenth-century coiners gang ( The Gallows Pole) to a late 1980s public obsession with crop circles ( The Perfect Golden Circle); where do you get your limitless inspiration from?

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Incorporating poetry, prose, play, diary and real historical accounts to create a novel like no other, Cuddy straddles historical eras - from the first Christian-slaying Viking invaders of the holy island of Lindisfarne in the 8th century to a contemporary England defined by class and austerity. Myers, Benjamin (2002). American heretics: rebel voices in music. Hove: Codex. ISBN 1-899598-23-5. OCLC 50175926.

This book was very close to a five star read for me and I think it is definitely a contender for the Booker Prize longlist which is announced on 1 August. Benjamin Myers has long made the stories of northern England his own: The Offing (2019) renders the region as a nation, apart and distinct; The Gallows Pole (2017) tells a bleak tale of injustice in 18th-century Yorkshire. Cuddy continues this journey of exploration, but now the form is more experimental and the writing more incantatory, as Myers traces just some of the manifold threads of history to remarkable effect. Neil HegartyI knew nothing about St Cuthbert before reading the novel although I was vaguely aware of the Early Christian church and Lindesfarne..This book manages to be about his cult following but to encompass so much more .It touches on amongst other things belief ,on love .on family and on early Christian architecture.The novel moves through time concentrating on a collection of characters who share characteristics through time but are mostly living in the area around Durham Cathedral .We meet an owl eyed boy in modern times who appeared in early historical sections likewise an orphan girl who cooks and provides for our characters is seen accompanying the itinerant passage of St Curhbert’s bones and repeatedly through time until she appears in our own time working in the Durham cathedral tea shop .i loved the way these stories disappeared and returned ,the author is able to change their writing style to match the time period so there is modern story telling towards the end but gothic Victorian In the middle .So clever I really appreciated the intellectual experience of reading it .Having said that don’t let it put you off as it is an easy comfortable read throughout Myers, Benjamin (2016). Turning blue. Rainton Bridge. ISBN 978-1-911356-00-4. OCLC 945718656. {{ cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher ( link) And all the while at the centre sits Durham Cathedral and the lives of those who live and work around this place of pilgrimage - their dreams, desires, connections and communities.

Charlesworth, Antonia (23 May 2022). "Radical and gently revolutionary". Big Issue North . Retrieved 16 July 2022. Fiction Uncovered Prize Longlist 2015". Jerwood Arts. 12 May 2015. Archived from the original on 21 January 2021. The third part takes place in the 1800’s and concerns two academics who attempt to exhume St. Cuthbert’s corpse. There’s a bit of fantastical element and it works.There is a strong smell of urine, the invisible scent markings of feral men after midnight staining the cold concrete. The stench of it is the perfume of bus stations everywhere; the desperate reek of transience at the crossroads of intoxicated. The Goldsmiths Prize awards fiction that “breaks the mould”. To achieve true inventiveness, a great novel must also craft its own form. The winner of this year’s prize, which I judged alongside Tom Lee of Goldsmiths University and the novelists Maddie Mortimer and Helen Oyeyemi, does just that – four times over. One of the many pleasures of Cuddy lies in spotting the multitude of links between the chapters. There is always an owl-eyed youth, a provider of victuals and seer of visions, a bad monk and a violent man, their prominence ebbing and flowing from story to story. Always and throughout there is the voice of Cuddy, speaking to them in dreams, borne on the wind and in the sound of the sea, passed down the generations through the memories and cherished relics of those who went before.