The Women’s Prize for Fiction longlist has been announced. The prize, formerly known as the Orange Prize for Fiction, was set up in 1996 to celebrate international fiction by women. Any woman writing in English, regardless of nationality, country of residence, age or subject matter, is eligible to enter.
“The list we have ended up with is, we believe, truly representative of that diversity of style, content and provenance, and contains those works which genuinely inspired the most excitement and passion amongst the judges,” said Miranda Richardson, this year’s Chair of Judges.
Six authors – Bonnie Nadzam, Ros Barber, Shani Boianjiu, Francesca Segal and M L Steadman – have been nominated for first novels. Meanwhile three – Hilary Mantel, Barbara Kingslover and Michèle Roberts – have written eight or more. Boianjiu, an Israeli who writes in English, and Turkish novelist Elif Shafak, are the only nominees listed from outside the Anglophone world. Zadie Smith and Barbara Kingslover have won the Prize in previous years: Smith for On Beauty in 2006, Kingslover for The Lacuna in 2010. Here is the list in full:
Kitty Aldridge – A Trick I Learned From Dead Men (Jonathan Cape)
Kate Atkinson – Life After Life (Doubleday)
Ros Barber – The Marlow Papers (Sceptre)
Shani Boianjiu – The People of Forever are Not Afraid (Hogarth)
Gillian Flynn – Gone Girl (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
Sheila Heti – How Should a Person Be? (Harvill Secker)
A M Homes – May We Be Forgiven (Granta)
Barbara Kingslover – Flight Behaviour (Faber & Faber)
Deborah Copaken Kogen – The Red Book (Virago)
Hilary Mantel – Bring Up the Bodies (Fourth Estate)
Bonnie Nadzam – Lamb (Hutchinson)
Emily Perkins – The Forrests (Bloomsbury Circus)
Michèle Roberts – Ignorance (Bloomsbury)
Francesca Segal – The Innocents (Chatto & Windus)
Maria Semple – Where’d You Go, Bernadette (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
Elif Shafak – Honour (Viking)
Zadie Smith – NW (Hamish Hamilton)
M L Stedman – The Light Between Oceans (Doubleday)
Carrie Tiffany – Mateship with Birds (Picador)
G Willow Wilson – Alif the Unseen (Corvus Books)
Shortly before last year’s winner was announced, Orange (now Everything Everywhere) announced it would no longer fund the award, choosing to focus instead on film sponsorship. After a number of fruity rumours, when no single financier stepped forward, a series of benefactors include Cherie Blair, Joanna Trollope and Bloomberg stepped in to plug the gap.
The shortlist will be announced on 16 April, while the coveted “Bessie” – a bronze statuette created by the artist Grizel Niven – and £30,000 cheque, will be awarded during a ceremony at the Royal Festival Hall on 5 June. Past winners have included Lional Shriver, Marilynne Robinon, Téa Obreht and Madeline Miller, who won the Prize in 2012 with her novel The Song of Achilles.
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