By Sharanya Gopinathan
The shortlist for the prestigious Women’s Prize in Fiction has just been announced, and two of our favourites have made it to the list!
The Women’s Prize in Fiction grants £30,000 (Rs 27,92,490) to the novel of the year that best displays “excellence, originality and accessibility in writing by women in English from throughout the world.” This year’s shortlist shows an interesting commitment to diversity in representation: Four of the six novels are written by women of colour, which, as Bustle points out, is a 100% improvement from last year, where only two books were written by women of colour.
The six novels and authors nominated for the Women’s Prize in Fiction, 2018 are The Idiot, by Elif Batuman, When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait of the Author as a Young Wife by Meena Kandasamy, The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock, by Imogen Hermes Gowar, Sight by Jessie Greengrass, Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie, and Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward.
The prize, sponsored by Deloitte, Bailey’s and NatWest, made this announcement the traditional way and also in biscuit form on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/WomensPrize/status/988385606991581186?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
We reviewed two of these remarkable biscuits, I mean, books earlier this year. In a really raw interview with us back in June, Meena Kandasamy told us about the difficulty of writing a book like this under siege, and how her husband would continually search her laptop for the word “husband” and delete whatever came up, a remarkably difficult way to write a book about domestic abuse. Earlier that month, we were also quietly marvelling at how Elif Batuman’s The Idiot, her debut work of fiction, made us feel complicated but satisfying feelings about academia once again.
The winner of the Women’s Prize in Fiction, 2018 will be announced on 6 June.