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March 2, 2007 — RUMBLINGS inside American Media now say that Editorial Director Bonnie Fuller is reaching out to Hachette Filipacchi and to TMZ.com, the celebrity dirt-digging Web site, as she scrambles for an exit strategy. The high-octane editor has usually shown little patience for staying in one job for very long and is clearly showing signs of strain in her current gig, where she still has more than two years remaining on her three-year contract. So far, there are denials on all...

Naked truth wins £10,000 literary prize for stripper turned novelist

May 31, 2007 on 6:01 pm | In Money |

A FORMER stripper has won a top literary prize for a novel that draws heavily on her years at one of London’s best-known strip clubs.

Fiona Dunscombe, 44, drew on her work at Raymond’s Revuebar in the 1980s for her first novel, The Triple Point of Water. The heroine is a striptease artist looking for her lost father.

The book yesterday won the Dundee International Book Prize for an unpublished novel, with a 10,000 award and a publication deal with Polygon.

Radio 4’s Today show host, James Naughtie, one of the judges, called it “gritty, dark and full of life”.

From about 200 entries and a shortlist of ten, it was the one that stood out as the work of a real writer, he said. “Obviously it had rough edges, but it was a story with insight and touch. It is very personal to her, very intimate.”

The book’s central character, Arabella Cordon, is a rural English girl who finds work in London’s Soho as a stripper.

Arabella is looking for her real father, who left her mother long ago. Other women in the book are also seeking father figures, a strong theme of the novel.

It closely reflects Ms Dunscombe’s experience. Her biological father left her mother before she was born. She tracked him down three years ago through an internet search, e-mailing him at his home in Sweden. Colin Scott Wheatley was at the ceremony yesterday, along with one of the two half-sisters Ms Dunscombe never knew she had.

“The book is very much about the way identity can be determined by all the father figures around you,” said Sarah Ream, the book’s editor at Polygon.

Ms Dunscombe now lives in France, with her seven-year-old son and accountant husband. She is the first international winner of the Dundee prize, which she heard about from a French academic who specialises in Scottish literature.

Born in Derbyshire, she moved to London after school and answered an advert for Paul Raymond’s club. A version of her audition appears in the book.

She worked there three years. The book reflects the days of Thatcher’s Britain, she said, with homelessness on the streets of London and a culture of blame and a “lack of compassion”.

Ms Dunscombe said she never suffered from the sex industry’s association with drugs, prostitution or pornography. But she struggled with self-esteem in a business that placed all its value on physical looks.

“There’s nothing bad about taking your clothes off, or about being nude per se, but when you do that for a living, you suffer from other people’s perceptions of what you do,” she said.

“It’s absolutely central to the book, looking very much at Soho as well as the strip club. I wouldn’t have been able to write that without having the experience to draw on. I don’t want to forget it.”

Ms Dunscombe has begun her second book - exploring the idea of being very connected to a father she never knew.