By Alison Flood
From Arundhati Roy to Jennifer Egan, some of the biggest names in literature have fallen by the wayside in the race for this year’s Women’s prize for fiction. Instead the judges have plumped for titles they felt “spoke most directly and truthfully” to them.
Three fiction debuts made the six-strong lineup for the £30,000 award: British authors Imogen Hermes Gowar, chosen for her historical novel The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock, which imagines the capture of a mermaid in Georgian London, and Jessie Greengrass for Sight, about the journey to motherhood; and American Elif Batuman for The Idiot, set at Harvard university during the 1990s.
“You can feel the full force of these new female voices … These aren’t the grand old names,” said chair of judges Sarah Sands, editor of BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. In what will be viewed as controversial, she added: “Maybe there was a kind of verve and freshness because people weren’t on the awards circuit – they’d just come and written a book because they had something to say. It wasn’t that there was an expectation.”
The best-known name in the running for this year’s award is British-Pakistani author Kamila Shamsie, chosen for her modern-day reimagining of Sophocles’ Antigone, Home Fire. Overlooked big hitters were Nicola Barker’s Goldsmiths-winning H(a)ppy, Gail Honeyman’s Costa-winning Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine and Fiona Mozley’s Booker-shortlisted Elmet.
“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 Sands. “The shortlist was chosen without fear or favour … Some of the authors are young, half by Brits and all are blazingly good and brave writers.”
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