Bernice Rubens, first woman to win Booker, honoured with Cardiff plaque

She was the first woman to be awarded the Booker prize and remains the only Welsh winner, but until now there has been no memorial to the achievements of Bernice Rubens.

On Friday a plaque will be unveiled honouring Rubens, who died in 2004, at her family home in the Roath area of Cardiff at a ceremony attended by literature scholars and politicians.

Sue Essex, the chair of Purple Plaques Wales, said: “Until today there was nothing to mark her very real and impressive achievements. I’m so glad we’ve been able to put this right with a plaque on the family home.”

Among those present will be Cai Parry-Jones, who featured Rubens in his book The Jews of Wales: A History, and has pointed out the disparity in how she has been remembered compared with the poet Dannie Abse, who was also born into a Welsh Jewish family and is honoured with a plaque placed on his house in Roath a year after he died.

Parry-Jones described Rubens’ Booker win for the novel The Elected Member, focusing on the struggles of a Jewish family in London’s East End, as “hugely significant”.

Rubens was born in Cardiff, the third of four children of Eli and Dorothy. Eli was a Lithuanian Jew who fled Latvia carrying two violins at the age of 16 in the hope of starting a new life in New York. After being swindled by a ticket tout in Hamburg he never reached the US, ending up in Cardiff.

Bernice Rubens worked as a teacher and a documentary maker before going on to publish more than 20 novels, the main themes of which were family life and Jewishness. She once said: “I don’t love writing. But I love having written,” and summed up her writing as: “Better than most, not as good as some.” She said of Cardiff: “It was a rich place to grow up.”

Parry-Jones said: “Bernice’s centenary last year [she was born in 1923] made me realise there was nothing in Cardiff to commemorate her life and work, which was a great shame. Anniversaries like this make us reflect on what has and hasn’t been done in terms of official commemoration.

“Until recently, Wales has had a poor record in publicly commemorating the achievements of Welsh women, which initiatives like the purple plaque campaign aim to rectify. I feel Wales has tended to commemorate its poets over its novelists as a result of deep-rooted bardic traditions.

“Unlike many Welsh writers, most of Bernice’s novels did not engage with obvious Welsh themes and settings, and she lived most of her life outside of Wales. However, Cardiff was very much considered home and her upbringing in a Jewish family in the city would prove to have a lasting impact on her writing.”

A family member, Janet Reuben, said: “The Rubens family are delighted that Bernice Rubens is being honoured in this way. Bernice spent her formative years growing up as a girl in Cardiff and these experiences inspired many of her works.”

The Welsh government’s chief whip, Jane Hutt, said: “Bernice Rubens was one of the most captivating and versatile novelists of the 20th century, and I am thrilled to see her achievements celebrated.”

Purple Plaques was launched on International Women’s Day in 2017 by a group of volunteers with the aim of improving the recognition of women’s contribution to Welsh life.