Helen Fielding launches Bridget Jones prize for northern comedy writing

The Bridget Jones author Helen Fielding has launched a comedy writing prize named after her most famous creation, to find funny new voices from the north of England.

The Bridget Jones prize for northern comedy writing will go to the funniest self-contained, first-person piece of prose of 1,000 words. The format echoes the anonymous diary columns in the Independent that first introduced readers to Bridget in the mid-1990s.

"Quietly hilarious"

Fielding, who grew up in Yorkshire, wrote those original columns and four Bridget Jones novels, and co-wrote the hugely successful films starring Renée Zellweger. She said Bridget's humour came from the people she grew up with: "laughing together at our mess-ups; bringing the fancy and pretentious down to earth".

"There are lots of famous northern comics," she said. "But this prize is for the comic voices of people who aren't famous: just living their lives being quietly hilarious."

She was firm about the word limit. "I always tried to make the Bridget columns exactly 1,000 words long, like making the petrol pump stop at exactly 20 quid," she said. "If it's slightly under you won't be punished. Just DON'T MAKE IT ANY LONGER!"

Who can enter

The prize is open to writers living in the north of England who have not been published and do not have a literary agent. There is no entry fee. The winner will receive £2,000, a session with Aitken Alexander Associates, the literary agency that represents Fielding, and support from the charity New Writing North. A runner-up will receive £1,000.

Submissions open on 23 November and close on 1 February 2027.

Fielding will judge the entries with an agent from Aitken Alexander and a representative of New Writing North, and will present the prize at next summer's Northern Writers' Awards in Newcastle. It will be awarded every year until 2029.

A first for the Northern Writers' Awards

Will Mackie, of New Writing North, said: "This is the first time the Northern Writers' Awards have featured an award exclusively for comedy writing. There is no one more fitting to identify an original comedy voice than Helen, who created one of the nation's most beloved comic characters of the last 30 years."

Fielding named Victoria Wood, Alan Bennett, Les Dawson, Thora Hird and Morecambe and Wise as her inspirations.

From newspaper column to bestseller

Bridget Jones's Diary was first published as a book in 1996 and became an international bestseller. Its diary format, with running tallies of cigarettes, calories and units of alcohol, has been widely imitated, and the character has since appeared in four novels and four films.

The new prize joins a growing number of awards aimed at finding writers from outside London and the south-east, where much of the publishing industry is based. Because it is limited to the north of England, writers in Birmingham are not eligible, but the format, a single page of funny first-person writing, is one that many new writers will recognise from the columns that made Bridget famous.