Strong Female Character takes the £5,000 Nero Award for non-fiction

Fern Brady has won the Nero Award for non-fiction, one of the most prestigious prizes in publishing.

Her memoirs Strong Female Character  – which have just been released in paperback – took the £5,000 prize, with judges calling the volume ‘raw, honest and moving’.

Published last year, the title looks back at her life so far through the lens of being newly diagnosed with autism.

Judges added that the book ‘recalls Fern’s experience in a teen psychiatric unit, her violent meltdowns, why a strip club is one of the most comfortable places she’s worked, and why exactly she would rather be an autistic woman than a neurotypical one.’

Speaking to Radio 4’s Today programme this morning, Brady said she was ‘buzzing’ with the news.

She said that although her autism was undiagnosed for so long, she ‘had a pretty good inkling’, adding: ‘I'd also had people from my audience telling me, I might be autistic.

‘I knew that I had to write a book about it, rather than really talk about it and stand up because I could only really talk about it with any level of nuance through writing a book, and I didn't really want to make jokes about it or reduce autism to the set of stereotypes that people understand it as.

‘By writing a book, I knew I could talk about autism in the way I wanted to, and I wanted to talk about being an autistic woman, particularly because so many aspects of sexism that women experience and things like medical misogyny, autistic women really experienced the sharp end of that. 

‘And that was what I was interested in, the overlap between feminism and autism. Having said that it has connected with so many men. The response from readers has been insane from day one.

‘I really thought it would be quite a niche book, I didn't think it would get anything like this level of interest. That's the embarrassing part now because I was really honest, in the book and now it feels like everyone is seeing my bare bum , except it's the bum of my soul.’

Brady’s book and the other winning titles – The Swifts by Beth Lincoln (children’s fiction),  Close to Home by Michael Magee (debut fiction) and The Bee Sting by Paul Murray  (fiction) – are now in the running for the additioal £30,000 Nero Gold Prize, to be announced at a ceremony in London on March 14.

Caffe Nero launched these accolades last year after rivals Costa abandoned their book awards, formerly known as the Whitbread awards. 

Brady goes on tour with her new stand-up show I Gave You Milk To Drink later this year.  (Fern Brady tour dates)

When asked on Today how she coped with the demands of a tour through her autism, Brady replied: ‘The demands of the tour are nothing compared to the demands of working in an office job and having to do small talk every day about things that you think are pointless and trying to try and anticipate what is the right thing to say every day constantly. second guessing yourself. 

‘Stand-up is the perfect job for an autistic person. You've got something of a routine, you get to see the same thing every night for an hour. And then when that thing isn't working, you create a system for it and you refine it and refine it until you get the same response from different boundaries.’ 

» Read our review of Strong Female Character here.  The book is available from Bookshop.org which aids local bookshops, below, or from Amazon at £5.49.

Published: 30 Jan 2024