Stef Penney was awarded one of Britain's most prestigious literary awards for her debut novel `The Tenderness of Wolves', despite the fact she has never been to Canada, where the book is set.
LONDON: Stef Penney was awarded one of Britain's most prestigious literary awards on Wednesday for her debut novel The Tenderness of Wolves, despite the fact she has never been to Canada, where the book is set.
Penney's work is just the fourth debut effort to ever be awarded the Costa Book of the Year award and the accompanying 25,000-pound ($49,230) prize since the competition began in 1985.
She beat off four other authors to win the prize, formerly known as the Whitbread award, which pits five books in five different categories against each other.
"I'm still shaking. I'm supposed to be a writer but I don't know how to describe how I feel," a shocked Penney said after she was named the winner.
Having developed agoraphobia, the fear of open or public places, when she left university, the 37-year-old author from east London instead relied on maps and other documents found in the British Library in the capital to research her novel.
Penney, who grew up in Edinburgh, Scotland, has since been cured of her agoraphobia, but was unable to travel by plane or train for 15 years. She says that she now finds the destinations she has since been to less exciting than she had imagined.
At the time of writing the book, however, it took her two and a half years to even gather the courage to make the trip from her home in east London to the British Library, in central London, and she has not yet visited Canada.
The Tenderness of Wolves, is set in 1860s Ontario and revolves around the brutal murder of a man and a teenager who goes missing and is suspected of his killing.
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