Benjamin Myers

Benjamin Myers is a British author, journalist, and poet whose novels, set in the wild landscapes of northern England, combine literary ambition with crime fiction, historical drama, and a deep, almost spiritual connection to the natural world. His work has won some of the most prestigious prizes in British fiction. Born in 1976, Myers grew up in the northeast of England and now lives in the Upper Calder Valley in West Yorkshire. The landscapes of northern England — its moors, fells, valleys, and coastlines — are central to his fiction, not merely as settings but as forces that shape his characters and their stories. Beastings (2014), set in the Lake District, follows a young woman fleeing across the fells with a baby, pursued by a violent man. It won the Portico Prize for Literature. The Gallows Pole (2017) was his breakthrough — based on the true story of David Hartley and the Cragg Vale Coiners, a gang of counterfeiters in eighteenth-century Yorkshire. The novel won the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction and was adapted by Shane Meadows into a television series. The Offing (2019) was a gentler, more meditative novel about a young man from a Durham mining village who meets an eccentric older woman on the Yorkshire coast.男 Pig Iron, These Darkening Days, Under the Rock, and The Perfect Golden Circle have further demonstrated his range. Myers writes with a poet's ear for language and a deep knowledge of the English landscape. His prose is vivid, sometimes brutal, sometimes lyrical, and always rooted in the physical reality of the places he describes. The audiobook editions of Myers's novels are richly atmospheric, with narrators capturing the landscape and language of his northern settings. His books and audiobooks are essential for readers who love literary fiction with a fierce sense of place and prose that sings.