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Two first time writers have won the biennial Portico Prize for Literature, with Sallie Day's Palace of Strange Girls (HarperCollins) clinching the fiction prize and Catherine Bailey, Black Diamonds (Penguin) winning the non-fiction prize.
Both authors win a cheque for £4,000. The prize celebrates writing set wholly or mainly in the north of England. In the fiction prize Day beat a shortlist including David Peace's The Damned United and Ross Raisin's God's Own Country. Her novel, about the post World War II live of a cotton mill town, was lauded by judges for "powerfully evocative of Lancashire in the 1950s".
Bailey's book examined the Wentworth estate in Yorkshire and the demise of the aristocratic Fitzwilliam family. It beat competition from the likes of Stuart Maconie's Pies and Prejudice and Bryan Talbot's Alice in Sunderland.
The prize was founded in 1985 and this year's award was for books published between 31st August 2006 and 31st August 2008. It is organised by The Portico Library on Mosley Street, Manchester, one of England's oldest surviving independent subscription libraries.