Recognition at last for Tessa Hadley, a domestic goddess

Few writers can create female characters like Tessa Hadley, whose Windham-Campbell prize is much deserved

When will there be good news? Well, here’s some: Tessa Hadley, the British writer, has won a Windham-Campbell prize (established three years ago, the awards support the work of nine writers each year with a grant worth $150,000).

I couldn’t be happier for her. She deserves all the prizes. Hadley is psychologically acute, drily witty and, whether describing a red-brick suburb or a sopping country afternoon, she is absolutely wonderful on place. Her relative obscurity, then, is an unfathomable mystery, even if I know deep down she is likely just another victim of a literary culture that tends to prize the male over the female, the grandly thematic over the so-called domestic. The female characters at the heart of her novels – clever, impulsive, not always wholly likable – are so finely drawn, I can never get them out of my head. Even now, whenever I see a train bound for Cardiff, I picture Kate, the heroine of her third novel, The Master Bedroom. What is she doing these days, I think to myself. Is she sleeping with yet another unsuitable man?

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