Nina Bawden - Literary Career

Literary Career

Some of Bawden's 55 books have been dramatised by BBC Children's television. Many have been published in translation.

Her novels include On the Run (1964), The Witch's Daughter (1966), The Birds on the Trees (1970), Carrie's War (1973), and The Peppermint Pig (1975). For the latter she won the 1976 Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, a once-in-a-lifetime book award judged by a panel of British children's writers. Carrie's War won the 1993 Phoenix Award from the Children's Literature Association (U.S.) as the best English-language children's book published twenty years earlier that did not win a major award. Bawden and Carrie's War had been a commended runner up for the Carnegie Medal in Literature from the Library Association, recognising the year's best children's book by a British subject.

In 2010 Bawden and The Birds on the Trees made the shortlist for the Lost Man Booker Prize. Forty years earlier, the Booker-McConnell Prize for the year's best British novel had skipped 1970 publications. Bawden and Shirley Hazzard were the only living nominees out of the six shortlisted; the award went to J. G. Farrell for Troubles. In 2004, she was awarded the Golden PEN Award by English PEN for "a Lifetime's Distinguished Service to Literature".

Other awards runners up

• 1987 Shortlisted for the Booker Prize – Circles of Deceit
• 1995 Shortlisted for the WH Smith Mind-Boggling Book Award – The Real Plato Jones
• 1996 Shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal – Granny the Pag