In the 24 hours since Helen Garner was named winner of Britain’s top non-fiction prize for her deeply intimate diaries, How to End a Story , she has been inundated with congratulations from fellow writers and readers and undertaken almost a dozen media interviews, including the BBC.

“Flabbergasted” and “exhausting” are how she describes the immediate aftermath of her being named as the winner of the prestigious Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction, her first major award in the UK.

Until shortlisted, she’d never heard of the literature award, and has long been ambivalent about the value of prizes themselves.

“It’s a very strange feeling because I’m getting all this kind of attention at the moment,” Garner, who turns 83 on Friday, told this masthead. In recent months, she has also gain

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