Paul Sayer
author
Paul Sayer (born 4 October 1955, South Milford, near Leeds) is an English author. His first novel, The Comforts of Madness won the 1988 Whitbread Award for both Best First Novel, and Book of the Year.
Life
Born in South Milford near Leeds, Sayer has lived in and around York since the age of 18. He was working as a psychiatric nurse in Clifton Hospital in York whilst writing his first prizewinning novel. Drawing on his own experiences, The Comforts of Madness is a first-person account of a speechless, catatonic patient in a hospital therapy unit. Over the next few years, with his work appearing in ten languages, he went on to write five further novels, including the Booker Prize 'long-listed' 'The Absolution Game'. But the last of these, Men in Rage, published in 1999 did not sell well and as he explains to The Press (York), he became disillusioned and gave up writing, eventually ending up working as a cleaner in a school. There, he was inspired to write again, producing a novel about adolescence, Like So Totally, which was published in 2010 with help from The Wingate Foundation. He now lives in Haxby. Following a long-standing renal complaint, he received a kidney transplant in 2011, and in 2014 his novel about the highwayman Dick Turpin, The True Adventures of Richard Turpin, was published.
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The subject matters to the people & ideas register because the source frames it as author. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7153449. VIAF identifies the subject as 59720335. The Library of Congress control number is nr88007788. None of the 3 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1955, 1988, 1999 and 2010.
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This entry incorporates text from “Paul Sayer” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.