Bernice Rubens

Welsh novelist born into a Jewish family in Cardiff, where she attended Cardiff High School for Girls and read English at the University of Wales. She taught at a Birmingham grammar school and made documentary films before her first novel, Set on Edge, appeared in 1960. Madame Sousatzka (1962), drawing on her pianist brother’s training, was later filmed. In 1970 she became the first woman to win the Booker Prize, with The Elected Member. She went on to write more than 20 further novels and died in London in 2004. A Five-Year Sentence was shortlisted for the 1978 Booker Prize.

Timeline of Bernice Rubens’s life

Works

Prizes