Bridget Jones author Helen Fielding has launched a comedy writing prize in the name of her most famous creation, aimed at unearthing funny new voices from the north of England.

The Bridget Jones prize for northern comedy writing will go to the funniest self-contained, first-person prose of 1,000 words. The format echoes the anonymous diary columns in the Independent that first brought Bridget to readers in the mid-1990s.

Fielding, who grew up in Yorkshire, wrote the original columns and four Bridget Jones novels , as well as co-writing the blockbuster film adaptations starring Renée Zellweger .

She said Bridget’s humour was drawn from the people she grew up with: “laughing together at our mess-ups; bringing the fancy and pretentious down to earth”.

“There are lots of famous northern comics,” she said.…