Sally J Morgan has won the Portico prize for her debut novel, which was inspired by her experience of being offered a lift by the serial killers Fred and Rosemary West.
Morgan’s Toto Among the Murderers, set in Leeds and Sheffield in the 1970s, follows the lives of Jude – known to her friends as Toto – and other women as violence moves closer, and the Wests stalk the country. It beat titles including Andrew O’Hagan’s Mayflies and Jenn Ashworth’s Ghosted to the £10,000 Portico prize, which goes to outstanding writing “that best evokes the spirit of the north of England”.
