Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction Awards Ceremony at Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre: 7 June 2017

 

London, 3 April 2017: The Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction today announces the 2017 shortlist. Now in its 22^nd* year, the Prize celebrates excellence, originality and accessibility in writing by women in English from throughout the world.

 

Author                         Title                               Publisher    Nationality

Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀̀	Stay With Me	Canongate	Nigerian	1st Novel
Naomi Alderman	The Power	Viking	British	4th Novel
Linda Grant	The Dark Circle	Virago	British	6th Novel
C.E. Morgan	The Sport of Kings	4th Estate	American	2nd Novel
Gwendoline Riley	First Love	Granta	British	6th Novel
Madeleine Thien	Do Not Say We Have Nothing	Granta	Canadian	3rd 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

 

This year’s shortlist - announced this evening (Monday 03 April) at an event at Waterstones, Tottenham Court Road, central London, hosted by novelist and Co-Founder of the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction, Kate Mosse -features one previous winner of the Prize, Linda Grant (When I Lived in Modern Times, 2000) and one debut novelist.

 

“It has been a great privilege to Chair the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction in a year which has proved exceptional for writing of both quality and originality,” said Tessa Ross, Chair of Judges. "It was therefore quite a challenge to whittle this fantastic longlist of 16 books down to only six. From Kentucky in the 19th century to a dystopian future to a post-war sanatorium in the English countryside to 1980s Nigeria, the shortlist celebrates narratives that are daring and intimate, that examine the depth of human experience in unique and compelling ways.   We were both impressed and moved by memorable characters from a young woman fleeing her home in China to a writer coming to terms with her failing marriage. These were the six novels that stayed with all of us well beyond the final page.”

 

Syl Saller, Chief Marketing Officer, Diageo commented, "The judges have selected an inspirational shortlist of six novels, each different but united by the exceptional quality of writing and depth of story-telling.Baileys is hugely proud to partner with the Women’s Prize for Fiction to champion writing by women, and celebrate the incredible pleasure of reading a great book.”

 

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 2017 is awarded for the best novel of the year written by a woman.  Any woman writing in English – whatever her nationality, country of residence, age or subject matter – is eligible.

 

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

 

The award ceremony will take place in The Clore Ballroom, Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre, London, 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 AGirl 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

 

@BaileysPrize #BaileysPrize

 

 

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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, all she wants. So when her in-laws insist upon a new wife, it is too much for Yejide to bear. Desperate to get pregnant before her rival, Yejide tries everything - arduous pilgrimages, medical consultations, dances with prophets, appeals to God – until her hopelessness leads to betrayal when she finally becomes pregnant.

 

But Yejide’s first child dies in infancy and the next child is diagnosed with sickle cell anaemia before he dies. When her third child arrives, she names her Rotimi (stay with me), but despairs about her chances. Meanwhile, her husband is hiding his impotence, his sense of failure mounting with each child they lose.

 

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.

 

Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀̀’s 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, Ife. She also has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia where she was awarded an international bursary for creative writing. Ayobami has been the recipient of fellowships and residencies from Ledig House, Hedgebrook, Threads, Ebedi Hills and Ox-Bow. She was born in Lagos, Nigeria. Stay With Me is her debut novel.

 

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The Power

Naomi Alderman

Viking

 

Suddenly – tomorrow or the day after – women find that with a flick of their fingers, they can inflict agonizing pain and even death.

 

What would a young girl do to an abusive father if she had this power? What would a female politician do if she had this power? Imagine how vulnerable a young man might feel alone in the street, late at night and a woman approaches him.

 

With a single twist, the four lives at the heart of Naomi Alderman’s novel are transformed, and we look at the world in an entirely new light

 

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. 

 

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The Dark Circle

Linda Grant

Virago

 

The Second World War is over, a new decade is beginning but for an East End teenage brother and sister living on the edge of the law, life has been suspended. Diagnosed with tuberculosis, they are sent away to a sanatorium, where they find themselves in the company of army and air force officers, a car salesman, a young university graduate, a mysterious German woman, a member of the aristocracy and an American merchant seaman. Trapped in this sterile, closed environment, with a host of extraordinary characters, they find 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. The Cast Iron Shore won the David Higham First Novel Prize. When I Lived in Modern Times won the 2000 Orange Prize for Fiction. Still Here was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Linda Grant 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. The Clothes on Their Backs, won The South Bank Show Literature Award, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2008 and longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. We Had it So Good was published in 2011 and Upstairs at the Party was published in 2014, by Virago.

 

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The Sport of Kings

C.E. Morgan

4th Estate

 

C. E. Morgan has crafted a compelling and beautifully written contemporary portrait about the scars of the past that run through an American family. The Sport of Kings is an epic story of speed and hunger, racism and justice.

                                 

Hellsmouth, a wilful thoroughbred filly, has the legacy of the Forges family riding on her. They are one of the oldest and proudest families in Kentucky; descended from the first settlers to brave the Wilderness Road; as mythic as the history of the South itself and now, first-time horse breeders.

 

Through an act of naked ambition, Henry Forge is attempting to blaze this new path on the family's crop farm. His daughter, Henrietta, becomes his partner in the endeavour but has desires of her own. When Allmon Shaughnessy, an African American man fresh from prison, comes to work in the stables, the ugliness of the farm's history rears its head.

 

Together through sheer will, the three stubbornly try to create a new future – one that isn't determined by Kentucky's bloody past – while they mould Hellsmouth into a champion.

 

C. E. Morgan is the author of All the Living (2009) and a recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award. In 2010, she was named by The New Yorker as one of their 20 writers under 40.  She lives in Kentucky.

 

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First Love

Gwendoline Riley

Granta

 

Neve is a writer in her mid-30s 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 her 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 intermittent 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 1979, and grew up in the Wirral. She is the author of 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. She lives in London

 

 

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Do Not Say We Have Nothing

Madeleine Thien

Granta

 

In Canada in 1991, 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 Shanghai 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's novel Do Not Say We Have Nothing was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2016 and won the Scotiabank Giller Prize 2016 and the Governor General's Award 2016. She is also 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. The daughter of Malaysian-Chinese immigrants to Canada, she lives in Montreal.