Bernice Rubens (Q63172)

Bernice Ruth Rubens (1923-2004) was a novelist, best known as the winner of the 1970 Booker Prize for Fiction (the first woman to win the prize) for The Elected Member, and as the winner of the 1976 Welsh Arts Council Prize for I sent a letter to my love, but she also published many other novels, short stories and articles, and worked as a teacher, a writer and director of documentary films, and a literary prize judge. Born in Cardiff in 1923, the third child of an Orthodox Jewish father from Lithuania, she was brought up in a musical family. Her three siblings all became professional musicians, but Bernice Rubens was drawn towards literature, and married the novelist Rudolf (Rudi) Nassauer in 1947. She left Cardiff for Birmingham in 1948, but soon became disillusioned with her post as a teacher of English and French. Resolving to pursue a career in film, Rubens moved with her husband to London in 1950, where they cultivated the friendship of writers and intellectuals. Over the next two decades she worked on a number of films for organisations such as the National Society for Mentally Handicapped Children, the Society for the Blind, and the United Nations. The films dealt mainly with the vulnerable and disadvantaged, particularly children, the disabled and the developing world. Critical reaction to Bernice Rubens's work has sometimes been mixed, but her novels have been published all over the world and her contribution to twentieth-century English literature is widely recognised. She died in 2004.