Kate Atkinson arrived upon the literary scene when her debut novel Behind the Scenes at the Museum unexpectedly won the 1995 Whitbread book of the year prize (renamed Costa Award in 2006), beating the favourites, Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh and Roy Jenkins’ Gladstone.
Behind the Scenes at the Museum, one of the dissenting judges of the Whitbread prize commented, is postmodern, “although I don’t know if Kate Atkinson knows it”. In fact, Atkinson had previously written a PhD thesis at the University of Dundee on “The post-modern American short story in its historical context”. Although she failed her viva, it is safe to assume that she knows what postmodernism is. The publicity surrounding her Whitbread Prize success brought out the worst in both the literary establishment and the British newspapers, who made the...
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Citation: Smith, Kevin P., M. Carmen Gomez-Galisteo. "Kate Atkinson". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 20 September 2002; last revised 10 April 2025. [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=5191, accessed 14 December 2025.]
