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Bridget Jones author Helen Fielding has launched a new prize aimed at discovering funny diary writers from the north of England, saying opportunities across the UK are “very uneven”.
West Yorkshire-born Fielding, who penned Bridget’s famous diary as well co-writing the film adaptations, has set up the Bridget Jones Prize with charity New Writing North.
The award will go to the person who submits the funniest 1,000-word piece of first-person writing.
Speaking at an event for the Independent, which first published Bridget’s diary in 1995, Fielding said the spread of opportunity for writing in the UK is “very uneven”, adding: “There’s much more opportunity in the south than in the north, where I grew up.”
The winner of the new prize – set to run for an initial three years from 2027 to 2029 – will receive a £2,000 prize and a package of writing support from Fielding’s literary agents and New Writing North.
Fielding’s original newspaper column went on to be published as a best-selling novel titled Bridget Jones’s Diary in 1996.
It spawned several sequels and hit movie adaptations starring Renée Zellweger as the endearingly chaotic and lovelorn thirty-something diarist.
‘Comedy heart’
In a statement announcing the prize, Fielding noted how the “comedy heart” of Bridget’s story came from the “everyday humour of people around me when growing up in Yorkshire: laughing together at our mess-ups; bringing the fancy and pretentious down to earth”.
“There are lots of famous northern comics,” said the writer, whose own work was inspired by the likes of Victoria Wood, Alan Bennett and Morecambe and Wise.
“But this prize is for the comic voices of people who aren’t famous: just living their lives being quietly hilarious.”
The Bridget Jones Prize will be awarded to an unpublished writer, without an agent, based in the north of England as part of New Writing North’s Northern Writers’ Awards.
Submissions will be open from 23 November 2026 to 1 February 2027.
The winner will be announced at the Northern Writers’ Awards ceremony in Newcastle next summer, and will be presented with the award by Fielding.
Will Mackie from 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.”
