The Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize was presented from 1967 until 2003 for the best regional novel of the year.

Winifred Holtby was born in 1898, the second daughter of well-to-do farmers living in Rudston, a village in North Yorkshire. At school in Scarborough, she contracted scarlet fever, which probably led to kidney failure later in life, the cause of her death in 1935.

After war experience as a hostel forewoman in a WAAC camp in France, Holtby returned to Somerville College to complete her degree, where she met Vera Brittain, also returning to College after nursing as a VAD. Brittain had lost a fiancé and a brother in the war. The beginning of her friendship with Holtby was inauspicious but by graduation they had arranged to live together in London as independent women, earning their living by lecturing and journalism, particularly for the League of Nations Union.

When Brittain married in 1925 Holtby stayed as part of the family, helping to bring up Brittain’s children. Her own career flourished, as a director of the feminist journal Time and Tide, and as a sought-after speaker on feminist issues. From 1926, after a visit to South Africa, she also became involved in a movement to unionise that country’s black workers. This became the ruling cause of her final years.

She published six novels, several set in the rural scenes of her childhood. Divided in her energies between political responsibilities and a creative impulse, she could never decide whether to be ‘a reformer-sort-of-person or a writer-sort-of-person…Only I trust my judgement as a writer… much more than as a worker for causes, and I actually enjoy writing more.’ Her last novel, South Riding, posthumously published in 1936 and still in print today (Virago, £10.99), is the main reason she is remembered today. Enduringly popular, its portrayal of a community on the North East coast encapsulates most of the social issues of the inter-war years, from education for girls to the need for maternity care and cheap housing for the poor. It also charts the decline of traditional rural hierarchies and farming practices in the failed love story between the local landowner and the feminist, egalitarian headmistress of a girls’ school.

Past recipients