22 Aug 2012 01:13:04
Janice Galloway's 'anti-memoir' of her teen years has been named Scottish book of the year,
All Made Up was the winner in the non-fiction section of the awards, before going on to secure the overall prize of £30,000 at the Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust Book of the Year ceremony at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on Friday.
Galloway said her first feeling was relief; "I'm a Scot in a lot of old fashioned ways and when I hear a piece of good news I doubt it. Every time the phone has gone over the past week I'm sure it's been Creative Scotland explaining they've made a dreadful mistake."
At the event she appeared alongside fellow authors and nominees Ali Smith, the winner of the fiction award for There But For The, Simon Stephenson, who won the First Book prize for his debut novel Let Not the Waves of the Sea, and Angus Peter Campbell who won the poetry prize for his collection Aibisidh. Each of the authors read extracts from their works before being presented with their prizes of £5,000.
All Made Up is Galloway's second autobiographical work, following on from her early years memoir This Is Not About Me, which was published in 2008. Her second memoir explores her teenage years, her love affairs with boys, music and latin, while growing up in a claustrophobic all-female household dominated by her monstrous older sister, Cora.
Though the titles of both books reveal her ambivalence about the memoir form - she has called them 'anti-memoirs' - she told an Edinburgh audience earlier in the week that she had "a memory like a razor-blade".
Reviewing All Made up in the Guardian, Ian Rankin wrote: While the question of veracity is intriguing, what is more important is that Galloway remains a brilliant writer, capturing mood and character, time and place, with seeming effortlessness ... There is a forensic level of detail throughout."
A biopic of the author's life based on the two memoirs has been commissioned by the BBC and is currently being produced by Scottish production company La Belle Allee and scriptwriter Andrea Gibb.
Originally from Saltcoats, North Ayreshire, Galloway won the MIND Book of the Year/Allan Lane Award in 1990 with debut novel, The Trick Is To Keep Breathing. She has also written an opera libretto with Sally Beamish for Scottish Opera, as well as poetry, short stories and novels.
She said she felt "very lucky" to have won, and planned to celebrate by going home and to bed with a cup of tea to watch telly with her husband.
