Dame Beryl Margaret Bainbridge DBE was an English writer and painter from Liverpool. She was primarily known for her works of psychological fiction, often macabre tales set among the English working class. Bainbridge won the Whitbread Awards prize for best novel in 1977 and 1996; she was nominated five times for the Booker Prize. She was described in 2007 as "a national treasure. In 2008, The Times named Bainbridge on their list of "The 10 greatest British writers since 1945"
As an artist her evolving style one can reasonably speculate that she must have learnt lessons from looking hard at the Expressionists (especially Munch), at Chagall, at Bacon, at Lowry and other realists such as Ben Shahn and John Bratby, as well as imbibing osmotically from her husband Austin Davies, a painter who taught John Lennon at the Liverpool School of Art, and her subsequent lover Don McKinlay, also of the same métier.
