His implication wasn’t hard to parse: This 40-something single mother, the product of a Scottish public university with several odd jobs on her résumé (hotel chambermaid, legal secretary), could not possibly have bested the likes of Salman Rushdie and Martin Amis deliberately, but only via some accidental whimsy - as if she were a talking dog, or a chicken trained to play tick-tack-toe. There’s an old story about the time Kate Atkinson took home her first major literary award, then known as the Whitbread Prize and now called the Costa, for her bravura 1995 debut, “Behind the Scenes at the Museum.” Even in the midst of bestowing it, the committee’s chairman, an august academic named Richard Hoggart, felt compelled to say that Atkinson had written a postmodern novel, though he doubted whether she knew it.
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