Women's Prize for Fiction

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London, 23 April 2018: The Women’s Prize for Fiction - one of the biggest international celebrations of women’s creativity in the world – today announces the 2018 shortlist. Now in its 23rd* year, the Prize celebrates excellence, originality and accessibility in writing by women in English from throughout the world.

 

  Author                      Title                         Publisher        Nationality

Elif Batuman	The Idiot	Jonathan Cape	American	1st Novel
Imogen Hermes Gowar	The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock	Harvill Secker	British	1st Novel
Jessie Greengrass	Sight	John Murray	British	1st Novel
Meena Kandasamy	When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife	Atlantic Books	Indian	2nd Novel
Kamila Shamsie	Home Fire	Bloomsbury Circus	British/Pakistani	7th Novel
Jesmyn Ward	Sing, Unburied, Sing	Bloomsbury Publishing	American	3rd Novel

The judges for the 2018 Women’s Prize for Fiction are:

 

Sarah Sands, (Chair), Editor of BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme

Anita Anand, Radio and Television Journalist

Katy Brand, Writer, Comedian and Actor              

Catherine Mayer, Journalist, Author and Co-founder of the Women’s Equality Party

Imogen Stubbs, Actress

 

This year’s shortlist features one previously shortlisted author and three debut novels.

“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.  “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.”

Set up in 1996 to celebrate and promote international fiction by women throughout the world to the widest range of readers possible, the Women’s Prize for Fiction 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 2018 Prize is supported by three partners. They are:

• Baileys;the world’s bestselling cream liqueur, which held the title sponsorship of the Prize from 2013 – 2017
• Deloitte; a leading professional services firm, providing audit, tax, consulting, and financial advisory services
• NatWest; one of the UK’s leading personal, private and business banks

The 2018 Women’s Prize for Fiction will be awarded on June 6^th 2018 at an awards ceremony in central London.  The winner will receive an anonymously endowed cheque for £30,000 and a limited edition bronze figurine known as a ‘Bessie’, created and donated by the artist Grizel Niven.

www.womensprizeforfiction.co.uk

 

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SYNOPSES AND BIOGRAPHIES

 

The Idiot

Elif Batuman

Jonathan Cape

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.

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The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock

Imogen Hermes Gowar

Harvill Secker

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.  

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Sight

Jessie Greengrass

John Murray

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. 

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When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife

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. 

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Home Fire

Kamila Shamsie

Bloomsbury Circus

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.

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Sing, Unburied, Sing

Jesmyn Ward

Bloomsbury Publishing

Jojo is thirteen 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 Wardreceived 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.

NOTES TO EDITORS

• This year’s shortlist comprises two British authors, two American authors, one British/Pakistani author and one Indian author.
• The following author has been previously shortlisted for the Prize: Kamila Shamsie (2015, 2009).
• There are three first novels on the 2018 shortlist; The Idiot by Elif Batuman, The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock by Imogen Hermes Gowar and Sight by Jessie Greengrass.

KEY DATES

• WPFF @ the Baileys Book Bar: 23rd – 27^th April
• Grazia/Women’s Prize for Fiction Book Club Live: 4th June
• Women’s Prize for Fiction 2018 shortlist readings: 5th June
• Awards ceremony: 6th June

Women’s Prize for Fiction

• *Orange was title sponsor of the Prize between 1996 - 2012 and Baileys, the world’s first cream liqueur, was title sponsor from 2013 – 2017.
• In May 2017, the Prize announced that it would be adopting a new sponsorship model.  From 2018, the Women’s Prize for Fiction will be supported by a family of sponsors, a group of leading brands and businesses from different sectors, rather than by a single title sponsor.
• The partners supporting the 2018 Prize are Baileys, Deloitte and NatWest.
• The Prize’s spokesperson is novelist and WPFF Founder Director, Kate Mosse, Harriet Hastings is Managing Director and Amanda Johnson is Project and Publicity Director.
• The Prize board comprises of Joanna Prior (Chair), Alison Barrow, Felicity Blunt (Company Secretary), Annie Coleman, Harriet Hastings (Managing Director),Karen Jones CBE, Louise Jury, Sandeep Mahal, Kate Mosse OBE, Anna Rafferty and Syl Saller.  Together they are responsible for the overall management and direction of the Prize and the sponsorship arrangements.
• The Prize Founding Patrons are Kate Mosse OBE, Clare Alexander, Jane Gregory, Susan Sandon and Carole Welch.
• The Prize patrons are; Dame Gillian Beer DBE, Rosie Boycott, Liz Calder, Shami Chakrabarti CBE, Helen Fraser CBE, Fi Glover, Daisy Goodwin, Muriel Gray, Bettany Hughes, Paula Kahn, Martha Kearney, Jude Kelly OBE, Helena Kennedy, Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws QC FRSA, Kirsty Lang, Sue MacGregor CBE, Sheena McDonald, Dame Jenni Murray DBE, Penny Perrick, Dame Gail Rebuck DBE, Miranda Richardson, Tessa Ross CBE, Gillian Shephard, Baroness Shephard of Northwold, Ahdaf Soueif, Sandi Toksvig, Polly Toynbee, Joanna Trollope OBE and Lola Young, Baroness Young of Hornsey OBE.
• Previous winners are Naomi Alderman for The Power (2017), 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).

About BAILEYS

BAILEYS was the world’s first cream liqueur, the perfect balancing act of aged Irish whiskey woven with fresh Irish dairy cream, a hint of cocoa and vanilla. It’s also the world’s biggest seller, with over 82 million bottles sold worldwide each year. Every minute of every day over 2000 people around the world are enjoying a BAILEYS. The BAILEYS word and associated logos are trademarks.

About Diageo:

Diageo is a global leader in beverage alcohol with an outstanding collection of brands across spirits, beer and wine categories. These brands include Johnnie Walker, Crown Royal, JεB, Buchanan’s and Windsor whiskies, Smirnoff, Cîroc and Ketel One vodkas, Captain Morgan, Baileys, Don Julio, Tanqueray and Guinness.

Diageo is a global company, and its products are sold in more than 180 countries around the world. The company is listed on both the London Stock Exchange (DGE) and the New York Stock Exchange (DEO).

For more information about Diageo, our people, our brands, and performance, visit us
at www.diageo.com. Visit Diageo’s global responsible drinking resource, www.DRINKiQ.com, for information, initiatives, and ways to share best practice.

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About Deloitte

In this press release references to “Deloitte” are references to one or more of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited (“DTTL”) a UK private company limited by guarantee, and its network of member firms, each of which is a legally separate and independent entity. Please see deloitte.com/about for a detailed description of the legal structure of DTTL and its member firms.

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About NatWest

NatWest serves customers in England and Wales supporting them with their personal, private and business banking needs, and supports large corporates in Western Europe. Alongside a wide range of banking services, NatWest offers businesses specialist sector knowledge in areas such as manufacturing and technology, as well as access to specialist entrepreneurial support.