Three debutants, a double winner of the US National Book Award and a writer who has previously been shortlisted twice feature on this year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction shortlist.
Now in its 23rd year, the £30,000 prize celebrates excellence, originality and accessibility in writing by women in English from throughout the world. The swinner will be announced on June 6th.
US author Jesmyn Ward won the 2017 National Book Award for Sing, Unburied, Sing, hasving previously won in 2011 for Salvage the Bones. British-pbaaswed Pakistanki author Kamila Shamsie has been shortlisted for Home Fire , hacving previously been shortlisted for Burnt Shadows and A God in Every Stone.
The three first novels on the 2018 shortlist are The Idiot by US author Elif Batuman, The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock by Imogen Hermes Gowar and Sight by Jessie Greengrass, both British. Indian author Meena Kandasamy’s When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife completes the shortlist.
“The shortlist was chosen without fear or favour. We lost some big names, with regret, but narrowed down the list to the books which spoke most directly and truthfully to the judges,” said Sarah Sands, chair of judges and editor of BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme. “The themes of the shortlist have both contemporary and lasting resonance encompassing the birth of the internet, race, sexual violence, grief, oh and mermaids. Some of the authors are young, half by Brits and all are blazingly good and brave writers.”
Her fellow judges are Anita Anand, Katy Brand, Catherine Mayer and Imogen Stubbs.
The Idiot by Elif Batuman (Jonathan Cape)
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Selin, a tall, highly strung Turkish-American from New Jersey turns up at Harvard and finds herself dangerously overwhelmed by the challenges and possibilities of adulthood. She studies linguistics and literature, teaches ESL and spends a lot of time thinking about what language - and languages - can do.
Along the way, she befriends Svetlana, a cosmopolitan Serb, and obsesses over Ivan, a mathematician from Hungary. The two conduct a hilarious relationship that culminates with Selin spending the summer teaching English in a Hungarian village and enduring a series of surprising excursions. Throughout her journeys, Selin ponders profound questions about how culture and language shape who we are, how difficult it is to be a writer, and how baffling love is.
Elif Batuman has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2010. She grew up in New Jersey and currently lives in New York, where she was a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library from 2013-2014. Her first book, The Possessed, was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award and a PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award. She has also received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Paris Review Terry Southern Prize for Humour and holds a PhD in comparative literature from Stanford University. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, n+1, Harper’s and the London Review of Books.
The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock by Imogen Hermes Gowar (Harvill Secker)
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One September evening in 1785, the merchant Jonah Hancock hears urgent knocking on his front door. One of his captains is waiting eagerly on the step. He has sold Jonah's ship for what appears to be a mermaid.
As gossip spreads through the docks, coffee shops, parlours and brothels, everyone wants to see Mr Hancock’s marvel. Its arrival spins him out of his ordinary existence and through the doors of high society. At an opulent party, he makes the acquaintance of Angelica Neal, the most desirable woman he has ever laid eyes on….and a courtesan of great accomplishment. This meeting will steer their lives on a dangerous new course.
What will be the cost of their ambitions? And will they be able to escape the destructive power mermaids are said to possess?
Imogen Hermes Gowar studied Archaeology, Anthropology and Art History at UEA before going on to work in museums. She began to write small pieces of fiction inspired by the artefacts she worked with and around, and in 2013 won the Malcolm Bradbury Memorial Scholarship to study for an MA in Creative Writing at UEA. She won the Curtis Brown Prize for her dissertation, which grew into her first novel. The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock was a finalist in the MsLexia First Novel Competition and shortlisted for the inaugural Deborah Rogers Foundation Writers’ Award.
Sight by Jessie Greengrass (John Murray)
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In Sight, a woman recounts her progress to motherhood, while remembering the death of her own mother, and the childhood summers she spent with her psychoanalyst grandmother.
Woven among these personal recollections are significant events in medical history: Wilhelm Rontgen’s discovery of the X-ray and his production of an image of his wife’s hand; Sigmund Freud’s development of psychoanalysis and the work that he did with his daughter, Anna; John Hunter’s attempts to set surgery on a scientific footing and his work, as a collaborator with his brother William and the artist Jan van Rymsdyk, on the anatomy of pregnant bodies.
What emerges is the realisation that while the search for understanding might not lead us to an absolute truth, it is an end in itself.
Jessie Greengrass was born in 1982. She studied philosophy in Cambridge and London, where she now lives with her partner and child. An Account of the Decline of the Great Auk, According to One Who Saw It won the Edge Hill Short Story Prize and a Somerset Maugham Award, and was shortlisted for the PFD/Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year. Sight is her first novel.
When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife by Meena Kandasamy (Atlantic Books)
Seduced by politics, poetry and an enduring dream of building a better world together, a young woman falls in love with a university professor. Marrying him and moving to a rain-washed coastal town, she swiftly learns that what for her is a bond of love is for him a contract of ownership. As he sets about bullying her into his ideal of an obedient wife, and devouring her ambition of being a writer in the process, she begins to push back - a resistance he resolves to break with violence and rape.
Meena Kandasamy is a poet, fiction writer, translator and activist, now based in London. She has published two collections of poetry, Touch and Ms Militancy, and the critically acclaimed novel, The Gypsy Goddess (2014), which was longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize and the DSC Prize in 2015.
Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie (Bloomsbury Circus)
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Isma is free. After years spent raising her twin siblings in the wake of their mother's death, she resumes a dream long deferred - studying in America. But she can't stop worrying about Aneeka, her beautiful, headstrong sister back in London, or their brother, Parvaiz, who's disappeared in pursuit of his own dream - to prove himself to the dark legacy of the jihadist father he never knew.
Then Eamonn enters the sisters’ lives. Handsome and privileged, he inhabits a London worlds away from theirs. As the son of a powerful British Muslim politician, Eamonn has his own birthright to live up to - or defy. The fates of these two families are inextricably, devastatingly entwined in this searing novel that asks: what sacrifices will we make in the name of love?
Kamila Shamsie is the author of seven novels: In the City by the Sea (shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize); Salt and Saffron; Kartography (also shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize); Broken Verses; Burnt Shadows (shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction) and, most recently, A God in Every Stone, which was shortlisted for the Baileys Prize, the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. Three of her novels have received awards from Pakistan’s Academy of Letters. Home Fire was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2017 and shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award 2017. Kamila Shamsie is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and was named a Granta Best of Young British Novelist in 2013. She grew up in Karachi and now lives in London.
Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward (Bloomsbury Publishing)
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Jojo is 13 years old and trying to understand what it means to be a man. His mother, Leonie, is in constant conflict with herself and those around her. She is black and her children's father is white. Embattled in ways that reflect the brutal reality of her circumstances, she wants to be a better mother but can't put her children above her own needs, especially her drug use.
When the children’s father is released from prison, Leonie packs her kids and friend into her car and drives north to the heart of Mississippi and Parchman Farm, the State Penitentiary. At Parchman, there is another boy, the ghost of a dead inmate who carries all of the ugly history of the South with him in his wandering. He too has something to teach Jojo about fathers and sons, about legacies, about violence, about love.
Jesmyn Ward received her MFA from the University of Michigan and has received the MacArthur ‘Genius’ Grant, a Stegner Fellowship, a John and Renee Grisham Writers Residency and the Strauss Living Prize. She is the first female author to win two National Book Awards for Fiction, for Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017) and Salvage the Bones (2011). She is also the editor of the anthology The Fire This Time, the author of the memoir Men We Reaped and the author of the novel Where the Line Bleeds. She is currently an associate professor of creative writing at Tulane University and lives in Mississippi.
