The Revd Dr Sarah Foot is Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History in the University of Oxford, and Dean Designate. Benjamin Myers' "Offene See" ist das Lieblingsbuch der Unabhängigen 2020". Buch Markt. 7 November 2020. Incorporating poetry, prose, play, diary and real historical accounts to create a novel like no other,Cuddystraddles historical eras - from the first Christian-slaying Viking invaders of the holy island of Lindisfarne in the 8th century to a contemporary England defined by class and austerity. The styles of the novels differ and each reader will likely find a different part appeals. The first section is perhaps the most innovative, with prose poetry mixed with a story told from attributed quotes from various sources, ancient and modern, on which Ben Myers has drawn. The latter aspects was one of the book’s highlights for me, but the prose poetry it’s weakest element, albeit one that put Cuddy in dialogue with Letty McHugh’s brilliant Barbellion Prize winning The Book of Hours.

The books that are chosen [for the Goldsmiths Prize] are challenging, experimental, expansive, interesting, and as a result, the writers of those books offer a very broad section of what’s going on in literature today. I think anyone on the shortlist this year was deserving of the prize so congratulations to all the other writers who were on the shortlist as well.” You'd be right in being confused. I am still confused and I've finished it! But I can recognise that this is a step up from what Myers has written before, and that it will bring him to the attention of people who perhaps haven't read his work before.Myers grew up in Belmont, County Durham, [2] and was a pupil at the estate's local comprehensive school where he become interested in reading and skateboarding. [3] Rating this a 3* read tells barely half the story. For a start, nothing about it is middling, or average. So perhaps even rating it all is a futile pursuit. The final section is modern day Durham and it’s about a romance between two people in their late teens/early 20’s. Recalling the humanity that was displayed in The offing, I felt this was the most heartfelt part of the book and it has elements which tie in with the previous three parts. It’s also the greatest love letter to the north he’s ever written. Along the way we meet brewers and masons, archers and academics, monks and labourers, their visionary voices and stories echoing through their ancestors and down the ages. The first part of the novel, Saint Cuddy, is told in the voice of Ediva, an orphan taken in by the monks as a child, now travelling with them as healer, cook and helper as they search for a final resting place for Cuddy’s coffin. Ediva is alive to the rhythms of the landscape in a way that marks her out as different; she also sees visions of the future cathedral – a building “bigger than anything man has ever built, so big it rears up like a mountain, like a great beast” – where the saint will finally be laid to rest.

Anderson, Hephzibah (19 March 2023). "Cuddy by Benjamin Myers review – a polyphonic hymn to the north-east". The Observer. ISSN 0029-7712 . Retrieved 24 March 2023.a b Myers, Ben (8 July 2011). "My Time Undercover At The News Of The World". Vice. Archived from the original on 24 May 2021 . Retrieved 24 May 2021. Then we skip forwards in three-hundred-year bounds, to the time the masons are constructing the final great gothic cathedral, then to a short play, with the cathedral itself as narrator. As the Civil War rages, the great building has become a prison for captured Scottish soldiers. It is not until 2013, when a new café is being constructed, that their mass grave will be discovered.

There wasn’t even really a script. Much of the series is born out of workshops, improvisations, and an acting and directorial approach that is entirely fluid. He starts with the out-line for a scene, and then builds it up from there. It is a unique approach – some might call it chaotic – but as a fellow Capricorn (we are considered the lone stubborn goats forging their own path high up on the hill-side), I completely respect and understand his approach. One of total creative control, but aided by collaboration. Incorporating poetry, prose, play, diary and real historical accounts, Cuddy retells the story of the hermit St. Cuthbert, the unofficial patron saint of the North of England. Tom Gatti, executive editor at The New Statesman said: “Congratulations toBenjamin Myers for his extraordinary novelCuddy– a prime example of the sort of ambitious, vital fiction that Goldsmiths and the New Statesman founded the prize to celebrate.” Ostensibly the story of St. Cuthbert and his influence on the Christian faith over the last 1400 years, this is a deeply philosophical novel. Myers explores several topics, many of them quite obvious: the difference between faith and religion, the cost of true devotion, and the interplay between Art and Science. Beneath the surface, however, there is so much more happening. History comes alive in here, he thinks, and the centuries overlap. The voices of the dead live on, they still speak today.

Church Times/Sarum College:

Book two, The Mason’s Mark, carries us forward to 1346. Fletcher Bullard – champion archer, domestic abuser – is off fighting the Scots. When his wife, Eda, meets Francis Rolfe, one of a team of masons engaged in repairing and enhancing Durham Cathedral’s decorative stonework, what occurs will live on in the stone.