Alma Cogan (ISBN 978-0-571-22284-1) is a 1991 novel by Gordon Burn, reprinted in 2004. It was Burn's first novel and won the Whitbread Book Award in 1991. In the UK it was published in 1991 with the title Alma Cogan. In the US, it was initially published as Alma. In real life, Alma Cogan was a well-known British light pop singer of the 1950s and early 1960s, known as "The Girl with the Giggle in Her Voice." A friend of the Beatles and many other pop acts of the era, Cogan died of cancer in 1966 at the age of 34. Source: Wikipedia (en)