Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction

Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction shortlist announcement: 3 April

Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction shortlist readings: 5 June

Awards ceremony: 7 June

 

 London, 8 March 2017: The Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction today announces the 2017 longlist. Now in its 22^nd* year, the Prize celebrates excellence, originality and accessibility in writing by women in English from throughout the world.  The announcement coincides with International Women’s Day 2017.

 

Author                   Title                                 Publisher                   Nationality

Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀̀	Stay With Me		Canongate	Nigerian	1st Novel
Naomi Alderman	The Power		Viking	British	4th Novel
Margaret Atwood	Hag-Seed		Hogarth	Canadian	16th Novel
Emma Flint	Little Deaths		Picador	British	1st Novel
Mary Gaitskill	The Mare		Serpent's Tail	American	3rd Novel
Linda Grant	The Dark Circle		Virago	British	6th Novel
Eimear McBride	The Lesser Bohemians		Faber & Faber	Irish	2nd Novel
Fiona Melrose	Midwinter	Corsair		South African	1st Novel
C.E. Morgan	The Sport of Kings		4th Estate	American	2nd Novel
Yewande Omotoso	The Woman Next Door		Chatto & Windus	South African	2nd Novel
Heather O'Neill	The Lonely Hearts Hotel		riverrun	Canadian	3rd Novel
Sarah Perry	The Essex Serpent		Serpent's Tail	British	2nd Novel
Annie Proulx	Barkskins		4th Estate	American	8th Novel
Gwendoline Riley	First Love		Granta	British	6th Novel
Madeleine Thien	Do Not Say We Have Nothing		Granta	Canadian	3rd Novel
Rose Tremain	The Gustav Sonata		Chatto & Windus	British	14th Novel

 

The judges for the 2017 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction are:

Tessa Ross, (Chair), CEO House Productions

Sam Baker, Journalist, Author and Co-Founder of The Pool

Katie Derham, Presenter and Broadcaster

Aminatta Forna, Novelist, Memoirist and Essayist

Sara Pascoe, Comic and Author 

“The judges had a large number of books of extraordinary quality to choose from this year, and so I can’t say that it was an easy process to come up with a list as short as sixteen,” commented Tessa Ross, Chair of Judges. “However, we’re all thrilled by where we’ve ended up and truly excited by the quality and range of talent on this year’s longlist. It’s a great showcase for the very best contemporary women’s fiction – we hope that it will inspire readers everywhere.”

Set up in 1996 to celebrate and promote international fiction by women throughout the world to the widest range of readers possible, the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction is awarded for the best full-length novel of the year written by a woman and published in the UK between 1 April 2016 and 31 March 2017. Any woman writing in English – whatever her nationality, country of residence, age or subject matter – is eligible.

This year’s longlist honours both new and well-established writers and different genres: the longlist features three former winners of the Prize – Eimear McBride (2014), Rose Tremain (2008) and Linda Grant (2000) – alongside three previously shortlisted authors. There are three first novels on the list and six nationalities are represented - UK, Ireland, America, Canada, South Africa and Nigeria.

The winner will receive a cheque for £30,000 and a limited edition bronze known as a ‘Bessie’, created and donated by the artist Grizel Niven. Both are anonymously endowed.

The winner will be announced at an awards ceremony to be held in The Clore Ballroom at the Royal Festival Hall on 7 June 2017.

Previous winners are – Lisa McInerney for The Glorious Heresies (2016), Ali Smith for How to be Both (2015), Eimear McBride for A Girl is a Half-formed Thing (2014), A.M. Homes for May We Be Forgiven (2013), Madeline Miller for The Song of Achilles (2012), Téa Obreht for The Tiger’s Wife (2011), Barbara Kingsolver for The Lacuna (2010), Marilynne Robinson for Home (2009), Rose Tremain for The Road Home (2008), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie for Half of a Yellow Sun (2007), Zadie Smith for On Beauty (2006), Lionel Shriver for We Need to Talk About Kevin (2005), Andrea Levy for Small Island (2004), Valerie Martin for Property (2003), Ann Patchett for Bel Canto (2002), Kate Grenville for The Idea of Perfection (2001), Linda Grant for When I Lived in Modern Times (2000), Suzanne Berne for A Crime in the Neighbourhood (1999), Carol Shields for Larry’s Party (1998), Anne Michaels for Fugitive Pieces (1997), and Helen Dunmore for A Spell of Winter (1996).

www.womensprizeforfiction.co.uk

 

ENDS

For more information or to speak to Chair of judges Tessa Ross, please contact:

Jane Acton or Georgina Church at Kallaway: Tel: 0207 221 7883

E: jane.acton@kallaway.com / georgina.church@kallaway.com

 

Notes to editors 

• This year’s longlist carries six British authors, three Canadian authors, three American authors, two South African authors, one Nigerian author and one Irish author.
• The following authors have previously won the Prize: Eimear McBride (2014), Rose Tremain (2008) and Linda Grant (2000).
• The following authors have previously been shortlisted for the Prize: Annie Proulx (1997); Rose Tremain (2004); Margaret Atwood (1997, 2001, 2004) and Heather O’Neill (2008).
• The following authors have previously been longlisted for the Prize: Linda Grant (2008) and Heather O’Neill (2015).
• Naomi Alderman won the Orange Award for New Writers in 2006.
• There are three first novels on the 2017 longlist.

 

SYNOPSES AND BIOGRAPHIES 

Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀̀

Stay With Me

Canongate

Yejide is hoping for a miracle, for a child. It is all her husband wants, all her mother-in-law wants, and she has tried everything – arduous pilgrimages, medical consultations, dances with prophets, appeals to God. But when her relatives insist upon a different choice, it is too much for Yejide to bear. It will lead to jealousy, betrayal and despair.

Unravelling against the social and political turbulence of 80s Nigeria, Stay With Me sings with the voices, colours, joys and fears of its surroundings. Ayobami Adebayo weaves a devastating story of the fragility of married love, the undoing of family, the wretchedness of grief and the all-consuming bonds of motherhood. It is a tale about our desperate attempts to save ourselves and those we love from heartbreak.

Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀̀was born in 1988 in Lagos, Nigeria. Her stories have appeared in a number of magazines and anthologies, and one was highly commended in the 2009 Commonwealth short story competition. She holds BA and MA degrees in Literature in English from Obafemi Awolowo University. Ayọ̀bámialso has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia where she received an International Bursary for Creative Writing. She was a 2012 OMI Fellow at Ledig House, New York and a 2015 Hedgebrook writer in residence. She works as Fiction Editor for Saraba Magazine.

 

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The Power

Naomi Alderman

Viking

‘She throws her head back and pushes her chest forward and lets go of a huge blast right into the centre of his body. The rivulets and streams of red scarring run across his chest and up around his throat. She’d put her hand on his heart and stopped him dead.’

Suddenly – tomorrow or the day after – girls find that with a flick of their fingers they can inflict agonizing pain and even death. With this single twist, the four lives at the heart of Naomi Alderman’s extraordinary, visceral novel are utterly transformed, and we look at the world in an entirely new light.

What if the power were in women’s hands?

Naomi Alderman is the author of three previous novels: Disobedience, The Lessons and The Liars’ Gospel. She has won the Orange Award for New Writers and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. She was selected for Granta’s once-a-decade list of Best of Young British Novelists and Waterstones Writers for the Future. She presents Science Stories on BBC Radio 4, she is Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University and she is the co-creator and lead writer of the bestselling smartphone audio adventure app and book Zombies, Run! She lives in London.

 

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Hag-Seed

Margaret Atwood

Hogarth Shakespeare

Felix is at the top of his game as Artistic Director for the Makeshiweg Theatre Festival. His productions have amazed and confounded. Now he’s staging a Tempest like no other: not only will it boost his reputation, it will heal emotional wounds.

Or that was the plan. Instead, after an act of unforeseen treachery, Felix is living in exile in a backwoods hovel, haunted by memories of his beloved lost daughter, Miranda. And also brewing revenge.

After twelve years, his chance finally arrives in the shape of a theatre course at a nearby prison. Here, Felix and his inmate actors will put on his Tempest and snare the traitors who destroyed him. It’s magic! But will it remake Felix as his enemies fall? 

Margaret Atwood is the author of more than forty books of fiction, poetry and critical essays including The Handmaid’s Tale, the Booker-winning The Blind Assassin, the MaddAddam trilogy and her latest novel, The Heart Goes Last. Her work has received many awards around the world. She has also worked as a cartoonist, illustrator, librettist, playwright and puppeteer.

 

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Little Deaths

Emma Flint

Picador

It's the summer of 1965, and the streets of Queens, New York shimmer in a heatwave. One July morning, Ruth Malone wakes to find a bedroom window wide open and her two young children missing. After a desperate search, the police make a horrifying discovery. It's every mother's worst nightmare. But Ruth Malone is not like other mothers...

Noting Ruth's perfectly made-up face and provocative clothing, the empty liquor bottles and love letters that litter her apartment, the detectives leap to convenient conclusions, fuelled by neighbourhood gossip and speculation. Sent to cover the case on his first major assignment, tabloid reporter Pete Wonicke at first can't help but do the same. But the longer he spends watching Ruth, the more he learns about the darker workings of the police and the press. Soon, Pete begins to doubt everything he thought he knew. Ruth Malone is enthralling, challenging and secretive - is she really capable of murder?

Emma Flint grew up in Newcastle and graduated from the University of St Andrews with an MA in English Language and Literature. She later completed a novel-writing course at the Faber Academy. Since childhood, she has read true crime stories, developing an encyclopaedic knowledge of real-life murder cases. She lives in London.

 

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The Mare

Mary Gaitskill

Serpent’s Tail

Ginger is in her forties and a recovering alcoholic when she meets and marries Paul. When it becomes clear it's too late for her to have a baby of her own, she tries to persuade him to consider adoption, but he already has a child from a previous marriage and is ten years older than her, so doesn't share her longing to be a parent at any cost. As a compromise, they sign up to an organisation that sends poor inner-city kids to stay with country families for a few weeks in the summer, and so one hot July day eleven-year-old Velveteen Vargas, a Dominican girl from one of Brooklyn's toughest neighbourhoods, arrives in their lives, and Ginger is instantly besotted.

Bemused by her gentle middle-aged hosts, but deeply intuitive in the way of clever children, Velvet quickly senses the longing behind Ginger's rapturous attention. While Velvet returns her affection, she finds the intensity of it bewildering. Velvet's own passions are more excited by the stables nearby, where she discovers she has a natural talent for riding and a deep affinity with the damaged horses cared for there. But when Ginger begins to entertain fantasies of adopting her, things start to get complicated for everyone involved.

Mary Gaitskill is the author of the story collections Bad Behaviour, Because They Wanted To and Don’t Cry and the novels Veronica and Two Girls Fat and Thin. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s, Esquire, The Best American Short Stories and The O. Henry Prize Stories.

 

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The Dark Circle

Linda Grant

Virago 

It’s 1949, the Second World War is over and a new decade of recovery is beginning, but for East End teenage twins who have been living on the edge of the law, life has been suspended. Diagnosed with tuberculosis, they are sent away to a sanatorium in Kent to take the cure and submit to the authority of the doctors, learning the deferential way of the patient.

Through doors newly opened by the year-old NHS go Lenny, a street dandy in his striped London drape suit, and his sister Miriam in her cherry-red felt coat and beret pinned gingerly onto stiff blue-black curls. Trapped in a sterile, closed environment, the twins find themselves in wider company than they’ve ever known - air force officers, a car salesman, a young university graduate, a mysterious German woman, a member of the aristocracy and the late arrival blasting through their lethargic submission to authority - an American merchant seaman with big ideas about how to wake up the joint. Together, they discover that a cure is tantalisingly just out of reach and only by inciting wholesale rebellion can freedom be snatched.

Linda Grant was born in Liverpool and now lives in London. She has published non-fiction and novels to great acclaim: The Cast Iron Shore won the David Higham First Novel Prize; When I Lived in Modern Times won the Orange Prize for Fiction; Still Here was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize; The Clothes on Their Backs won the South Bank Show Literature Award and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. It was followed by We Had It So Good and Upstairs at the Party. She is also the author of Sexing the Millennium; Remind Me Who I Am, Again; The People on the Street, which won the Lettre Ulysses Prize for Literary Reportage; and The Thoughtful Dresser.

 

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The Lesser Bohemians

Eimear McBride

Faber and Faber 

An eighteen-year-old Irish girl arrives in London to study drama and falls violently in love with an older actor. This older man has a disturbing past that the young girl is unprepared for. The young girl has a troubling past of her own. This is her story and their story. 

Eimear McBride grew up in the west of Ireland and studied acting at Drama Centre London. Her debut novel A Girl is a Half-formed Thing took nine years to publish and subsequently received the inaugural Goldsmiths Prize, the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction, Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year, the Desmond Elliot Prize and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. Her short fiction has appeared in Dubliners 100, The Long Gaze Back and on BBC Radio 4. She occasionally reviews for the Guardian, TLS, New Statesman and New York Times Book Review.

 

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Midwinter

Fiona Melrose

Corsair

Father and son, Landyn and Vale Midwinter are Suffolk farmers, living together on land their family has worked for generations. But they are haunted there by a past they have long refused to confront: the death of Cecelia, beloved wife and mother, when Vale was just a child. Both men have carried her loss, unspoken. Until now.

With the onset of a mauling winter, something between them snaps. While Vale makes increasingly desperate decisions, Landyn retreats, finding solace in the land, his animals - and a vixen who haunts the farm and seems to bring with her both comfort and protection.

Fiona Melrose was born in Johannesburg but has spent the majority of her adult life in the UK, first in London and then in East Anglia. She moved to Suffolk to concentrate on her writing. It is there that Midwinter was conceived. Previously Fiona has worked in academia, NGO’s, public affairs and as an emerging markets analyst. She continues to keep a foot in both continents and is currently spending the majority of her time back in South Africa where she is completing her second novel.

 

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The Sport of Kings

C.E. Morgan

4th Estate 

Hellsmouth, an indomitable thoroughbred filly, runs for the glory of the Forge family, one of Kentucky’s oldest and most powerful dynasties. Henry Forge has partnered with his daughter, Henrietta, in an endeavour of raw obsession: to breed a champion. But when Allmon Shaughnessy, an ambitious young black man, comes to work on their farm after a stint in prison, the violence of the Forges’ history and the exigencies of appetite are brought starkly into view. Entangled by fear, prejudice and lust, the three tether their personal dreams of glory to the speed and power of Hellsmouth. 

C.E. Morgan lives with her husband Will Guild in Berea, Kentucky. She is a graduate of Berea College, and Harvard Divinity School. She won the 2016 Kirkus Prize and Windham-Campbell Literature Prize, and in 2009 was named a 5 under 35 honouree by the National Book Foundation. She is the author of All the Living.

 

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The Woman Next Door

Yewande Omotoso

Vintage 

Hortensia and Marion are next-door neighbours in a charming, bougainvillea-laden Cape Town suburb. One is black, one white. Both are successful women with impressive careers behind them. Both have recently been widowed. Both are in their eighties.  And both are sworn enemies, sharing hedge and hostility pruned with zeal.

But one day an unforeseen event forces the women together. Could long-held mutual loathing transform into friendship?  Love thy neighbour? Easier said than done?

Yewande Omotoso was born in Barbados and grew up in Nigeria, moving to South Africa with her family in 1992. She is the author of Bom Boy, published in South Africa in 2011. In 2012 she won the South African Literary Award for First-Time Published Author and was shortlisted for the South African Sunday Times Fiction Prize. In 2013 she was a finalist in the inaugural, pan-African Etisalat Fiction Prize. She lives in Johannesburg, where she writes and has her own architectural practice.

 

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The Lonely Hearts Hotel

Heather O’Neill

riverrun

Two babies are abandoned in a Montreal orphanage in the winter of 1914. Before long, their talents emerge: Pierrot is a piano prodigy; Rose lights up even the dreariest room with her dancing and comedy. As they travel around the city performing clown routines, the children fall in love with each other and dream up a plan for the most extraordinary and seductive circus show the world has ever seen.  

Separated as teenagers, sent off to work as servants during the Great Depression, both descend into the city’s underworld, dabbling in sex, drugs and theft in order to survive. But when Rose and Pierrot finally reunite beneath the snowflakes – after years of searching and desperate poverty – the possibilities of their childhood dreams are renewed, and they’ll go to extreme lengths to make them come true. Soon, Rose, Pierrot and their troupe of clowns and chorus girls have hit New York, commanding the stage as well as the alleys, and neither the theatre nor the underworld will ever look the same.

Heather O’Neill has written for This American Life and the New York Times. Her first novel Lullabies for Little Criminals, was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction; her second, The Girl Who Was Saturday Night, was longlisted for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction, and shortlisted for the Giller Prize. Her collection of short stories, Daydreams of Angels, won the Danuta Gleed Literary Award and was also shortlisted for the Giller Prize. She lives in Montreal with her daughter and a chihuahua named Hamlet.

 

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The Essex Serpent

Sarah Perry

Serpent’s Tail

London 1893. When Cora Seaborne’s husband dies, she steps into her new life as a widow with as much relief as sadness: her marriage was not a happy one, and she never suited the role of society wife. Accompanied by her son Francis - a curious, obsessive boy - she leaves town for Essex, where she hopes fresh air and open space will provide the refuge they need. When they take lodgings in Colchester, rumours reach them from further up the estuary that the mythical Essex Serpent, once said to roam the marshes claiming human lives, has returned to the coastal parish of Aldwinter. Cora, a keen amateur naturalist with no patience for religion or superstition, is immediately enthralled, convinced that what the local people think is a magical beast may be a previously undiscovered species. As she sets out on its trail, she is introduced to William Ransome, Aldwinter’s vicar. 

Like Cora, Will is deeply suspicious of the rumours, but he thinks they are founded on moral panic, a flight from real faith. As he tries to calm his parishioners, he and Cora strike up an intense relationship, and although they agree on absolutely nothing, they find themselves inexorably drawn together and torn apart, eventually changing each other’s lives in ways entirely unexpected.

Sarah Perry was born in Essex in 1979. She has a PhD in creative writing from Royal Holloway, and has been the writer in residence at Gladstone’s Library and the UNESCO World City of Literature Writer in Residence in Prague. Her first novel, After Me Comes the Flood, was longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the Folio Prize, and won the East Anglian Book of the Year Award, in 2014. She lives in Norwich.

 

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Barkskins

Annie Proulx

4th Estate

In the late seventeenth century, two penniless young Frenchmen, René Sel and Charles Duquet, arrive in New France. Bound to a feudal lord, a ‘seigneur’, for three years in exchange for land, they become wood-cutters - barkskins. René suffers extraordinary hardship, oppressed by the forest he is charged with clearing. He is forced to marry a Mi’kmaw woman and their descendants live trapped between two inimical cultures. But Duquet, crafty and ruthless, runs away from the seigneur, becomes a fur trader, then sets up a timber business.

Proulx tells the stories of the descendants of Sel and Duquet over three hundred years - their travels across North America, to Europe, China and New Zealand, under stunningly brutal conditions: the revenge of rivals; accidents; pestilence; Indian attacks; and cultural annihilation. Over and over again, they seize what they can of a presumed infinite resource, leaving the modern-day characters face to face with possible ecological collapse. 

Annie Proulx is the author of eight books, including the novel The Shipping News and the story collection Close Range. Her many honours include a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, the Irish Times International Fiction Prize and a PEN/Faulkner award. Her story Brokeback Mountain, which originally appeared in the New Yorker, was made into an Academy Award-winning film. She lives in Seattle.

 

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First Love

Gwendoline Riley

Granta 

Neve is a writer in her mid-thirties married to an older man, Edwyn. For now they are in a place of relative peace, but their past battles have left scars. As Neve recalls the decisions that led her to this marriage, she tells of other loves and other debts, from her bullying father and self-involved mother to a musician who played her and a series of lonely flights from place to place.

Drawing the reader into the battleground of her relationship, Neve spins a story of helplessness and hostility, an ongoing conflict in which both husband and wife have played a part. But is this, nonetheless, also a story of love?

Gwendoline Riley was born in London in 1979. She is the author of the novels Cold Water, Sick Notes, Joshua Spassky and Opposed Positions. Her writing has won a Betty Trask Award and a Somerset Maugham Award, and has been shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize.

 

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Do Not Say We Have Nothing

Madeleine Thien

Granta

In Canada in 1990, ten-year-old Marie and her mother invite a guest into their home: a young woman who has fled China in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square protests. Her name is Ai-ming.

As her relationship with Marie deepens, Ai-ming tells the story of her family in revolutionary China, from the crowded teahouses in the first days of Chairman Mao’s ascent to the Shangahi Conservatory in the 1960s and the events leading to the Beijing demonstrations of 1989. It is a history of revolutionary idealism, music and silence, in which three musicians, the shy and brilliant composer Sparrow, the violin prodigy Zhuli, and the enigmatic pianist Kai struggle during China’s relentless Cultural Revolution to remain loyal to one another and to the music they have devoted their lives to. Forced to re-imagine their artistic and private selves, their fates reverberate through the years, with deep and lasting consequences for Ai-ming - and for Marie.

Madeleine Thien is the author of the story collection Simple Recipes (2001) and the novels Certainty (2006) and Dogs at the Perimeter (Granta, 2012), which was shortlisted for Berlin’s 2014 International Literature Award and won the Frankfurt Book Fair’s 2015 LiBeraturpreis. Her books and stories have been translated into 23 languages. Her essays have appeared in Granta, the Guardian, the Financial Times, Five Dials, and Brick, and her story The Wedding Cake was shortlisted for the 2015 Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award. The daughter of Malaysian-Chinese immigrants to Canada, she lives in Montreal.

 

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The Gustav Sonata

Rose Tremain

Chatto & Windus

What is the difference between friendship and love? Or between neutrality and commitment? Gustav Perle grows up in a small town in ‘neutral’ Switzerland, where the horrors of the Second World War seem a distant echo. But Gustav’s father has mysteriously died, and his adored mother Emilie is strangely cold and indifferent to him. Gustav’s childhood is spent in lonely isolation, his only toy a tin train with painted passengers staring blankly from the carriage windows.

As time goes on, an intense friendship with a boy of his own age, Anton Zwiebel, begins to define Gustav’s life. Jewish and mercurial, a talented pianist tortured by nerves when he has to play in public, Anton fails to understand how deeply and irrevocably his life and Gustav’s are entwined.

Rose Tremain’s bestselling novels have been published in thirty countries and have won many awards, including the Orange Prize for Fiction (The Road Home), the Whitbread Novel Award (Music & Silence)and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (Sacred Country); Restoration was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Rose Tremain was made a CBE in 2007 and was appointed Chancellor of the University of East Anglia in 2013. She lives in Norfolk and London with the biographer, Richard Holmes.