The women’s prize for fiction, established to redress the tendency by
literary awards to overlook writing by women, is now in its 20th year, but chair
of this year’s judges Shami Chakrabarti believes we are “still nowhere near
where we should be” when it comes to literary recognition for women.
Announcing a longlist of 20 titles for the Baileys women’s prize for fiction, which runs the gamut from literary works by the likes of Ali Smith, Anne Tyler, Kamila Shamsie, Sarah Waters and Rachel Cusk to dystopian science fiction and thrillers, the Liberty director was adamant that there is still a place for a literary award focusing on women’s fiction.
“I think we do need to keep celebrating women’s fiction. We need to celebrate women generally and there’s nothing more powerful than stories,” said Chakrabarti. “We need to celebrate stories by women, for women, as just one more way to redress gender injustice.”
Gender injustice, said the campaigner, is “the greatest human rights violation in the world ... like an apartheid. It’s global in reach and millennial in duration. It’s certainly not a time to be doing anything less.”
The women’s prize for fiction was launched in the wake of the judges’ failure to shortlist a single female author for the Booker prize of 1991. Literary figures led by the author Kate Mosse discovered that “by 1992, only 10% of novelists shortlisted for the Booker prize had been women”; by 1996, their plan to launch an award solely for women had come to fruition. After years of sponsorship by Orange, the 2013 award was privately funded by sponsors including Cherie Blair and Joanna Trollope. The prize is now sponsored by Baileys.
“We are still nowhere near where we should be,” said Chakrabarti. “I also don’t think women are getting their due in other literary prizes. I am still surprised at some of the lists and comments made by judges and chairs of judges elsewhere, so I don’t think it’s time to end a women’s prize.”
According to Guardian analysis, since 1996 there have been 12 male winners of the Man Booker prize and seven female winners, which is just over 35%, but when you look at the shortlists the ratio drops to 25%, with 23 women, as against 70 men.
“Literature ought to be further on than it is, given how long women have been writing brilliant stuff,” said Chakrabarti. “It’s just hilarious to me that we should target a women’s book prize ... at a time when women are so much further back then they should be, not just in publishing but in politics, economics, health care ... I think there is still work to do and there’s an ocean of talent to be discussed and shared and celebrated, and this is one way of doing it.”
Chakrabarti was joined on the judging panel for this year’s award by Laura Bates, founder of The Everyday Sexism Project, columnist Grace Dent, novelist Helen Dunmore and presenter Cathy Newman. They read a total of 165 books to come up with their longlist of 20 novels for the £30,000 award, a lineup which the Liberty director called a list “to be proud of – with its mix of genres and styles, first-timers and well-known names from around the world”.
American veteran Tyler is longlisted for her 20th novel, the story of three generations of a family A Spool of Blue Thread, alongside Smith’s dual narrative How to Be Both, which twines together the stories of a renaissance artist of the 1460s and a modern teenager, and which has already won the Goldsmiths prize and the Costa novel award. Waters, chosen this time for her historical novel The Paying Guests, has been shortlisted twice before for the award, as has Tyler.
Five debut writers also made the cut, from Emma Healey’s bestselling and Costa-winning first novel Elizabeth Is Missing, narrated by an elderly woman with dementia, to Laline Paull, whose The Bees is a dystopia set in a beehive.
Tiny UK publisher Legend Press has two first novelists on the longlist, Jemma Wayne for After Before, in which three women reach crisis point during a cold British winter, and PP Wong for The Life of a Banana, narrated by Xing Li, “what some Chinese people call a banana – yellow on the outside and white on the inside”.
Emily St John Mandel’s tale of a world wiped out by the flu, Station Eleven, and Sandra Newman’s dystopian The Country of Ice Cream Star, were also chosen by judges.
The award is open to novels written in English by women from anywhere in the world, provided they are published in the UK, and is intended to reward “excellence, originality and accessibility in writing”. Chakrabarti said there had been a “very strong showing of UK writers”, on this year’s longlist.
The winner will be announced on 3 June, following the unveiling of the shortlist on 13 April. The award has previously honoured writers including Eimear McBride, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Zadie Smith and Andrea Levy. Dunmore, on the judging panel this year, took the inaugural prize for her novel A Spell of Winter, in 1996.
Crooked Heart by Lissa Evans (Doubleday) – British – 4th novel
Aren’t We Sisters? by Patricia Ferguson (Penguin) – British – 8th novel
I Am China by Xiaolu Guo (Chatto & Windus) – Chinese/ British – 6th novel
Dear Thief by Samantha Harvey (Jonathan Cape) – British - 3rd novel
Elizabeth is Missing by Emma Healey (Viking) – British – 1st novel
Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel (Picado) – Canadian – 4th novel
The Offering by Grace McCleen (Sceptre) – British – 3rd novel
The Country of Ice Cream Star by Sandra Newman (Chatto & Windus) – British/American – 3rd novel
The Girl Who Was Saturday Night by Heather O’Neill (Quercus) – Canadian – 2nd novel
The Bees by Laline Paull (Fourth Estate) – British - 1st novel
The Table of Less Valued Knights by Marie Phillips (Jonathan Cape) – British – 2nd Novel
The Walk Home by Rachel Seiffert (Virago) – British – 3rd novel
A God in Every Stone by Kamila Shamsie (Bloomsbury) – Pakistani/British – 6th novel
How to be Both by Ali Smith (Hamish Hamilton) - British – 6th novel
The Shore by Sara Taylor (William Heinemann) – American – 1st novel
A Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler (Chatto & Windus) – American – 20th novel
The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters (Virago) – British – 6th novel
After Before by Jemma Wayne (Legend Press) – British – 1st novel
The Life of a Banana by PP Wong (Legend Press) – British – 1st novel
Announcing a longlist of 20 titles for the Baileys women’s prize for fiction, which runs the gamut from literary works by the likes of Ali Smith, Anne Tyler, Kamila Shamsie, Sarah Waters and Rachel Cusk to dystopian science fiction and thrillers, the Liberty director was adamant that there is still a place for a literary award focusing on women’s fiction.
“I think we do need to keep celebrating women’s fiction. We need to celebrate women generally and there’s nothing more powerful than stories,” said Chakrabarti. “We need to celebrate stories by women, for women, as just one more way to redress gender injustice.”
Gender injustice, said the campaigner, is “the greatest human rights violation in the world ... like an apartheid. It’s global in reach and millennial in duration. It’s certainly not a time to be doing anything less.”
The women’s prize for fiction was launched in the wake of the judges’ failure to shortlist a single female author for the Booker prize of 1991. Literary figures led by the author Kate Mosse discovered that “by 1992, only 10% of novelists shortlisted for the Booker prize had been women”; by 1996, their plan to launch an award solely for women had come to fruition. After years of sponsorship by Orange, the 2013 award was privately funded by sponsors including Cherie Blair and Joanna Trollope. The prize is now sponsored by Baileys.
“We are still nowhere near where we should be,” said Chakrabarti. “I also don’t think women are getting their due in other literary prizes. I am still surprised at some of the lists and comments made by judges and chairs of judges elsewhere, so I don’t think it’s time to end a women’s prize.”
According to Guardian analysis, since 1996 there have been 12 male winners of the Man Booker prize and seven female winners, which is just over 35%, but when you look at the shortlists the ratio drops to 25%, with 23 women, as against 70 men.
“Literature ought to be further on than it is, given how long women have been writing brilliant stuff,” said Chakrabarti. “It’s just hilarious to me that we should target a women’s book prize ... at a time when women are so much further back then they should be, not just in publishing but in politics, economics, health care ... I think there is still work to do and there’s an ocean of talent to be discussed and shared and celebrated, and this is one way of doing it.”
Chakrabarti was joined on the judging panel for this year’s award by Laura Bates, founder of The Everyday Sexism Project, columnist Grace Dent, novelist Helen Dunmore and presenter Cathy Newman. They read a total of 165 books to come up with their longlist of 20 novels for the £30,000 award, a lineup which the Liberty director called a list “to be proud of – with its mix of genres and styles, first-timers and well-known names from around the world”.
American veteran Tyler is longlisted for her 20th novel, the story of three generations of a family A Spool of Blue Thread, alongside Smith’s dual narrative How to Be Both, which twines together the stories of a renaissance artist of the 1460s and a modern teenager, and which has already won the Goldsmiths prize and the Costa novel award. Waters, chosen this time for her historical novel The Paying Guests, has been shortlisted twice before for the award, as has Tyler.
Five debut writers also made the cut, from Emma Healey’s bestselling and Costa-winning first novel Elizabeth Is Missing, narrated by an elderly woman with dementia, to Laline Paull, whose The Bees is a dystopia set in a beehive.
Tiny UK publisher Legend Press has two first novelists on the longlist, Jemma Wayne for After Before, in which three women reach crisis point during a cold British winter, and PP Wong for The Life of a Banana, narrated by Xing Li, “what some Chinese people call a banana – yellow on the outside and white on the inside”.
Emily St John Mandel’s tale of a world wiped out by the flu, Station Eleven, and Sandra Newman’s dystopian The Country of Ice Cream Star, were also chosen by judges.
The award is open to novels written in English by women from anywhere in the world, provided they are published in the UK, and is intended to reward “excellence, originality and accessibility in writing”. Chakrabarti said there had been a “very strong showing of UK writers”, on this year’s longlist.
The winner will be announced on 3 June, following the unveiling of the shortlist on 13 April. The award has previously honoured writers including Eimear McBride, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Zadie Smith and Andrea Levy. Dunmore, on the judging panel this year, took the inaugural prize for her novel A Spell of Winter, in 1996.
Baileys women’s prize for fiction longlist 2015
Outline by Rachel Cusk (Faber and Faber) – British – 8th novelCrooked Heart by Lissa Evans (Doubleday) – British – 4th novel
Aren’t We Sisters? by Patricia Ferguson (Penguin) – British – 8th novel
I Am China by Xiaolu Guo (Chatto & Windus) – Chinese/ British – 6th novel
Dear Thief by Samantha Harvey (Jonathan Cape) – British - 3rd novel
Elizabeth is Missing by Emma Healey (Viking) – British – 1st novel
Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel (Picado) – Canadian – 4th novel
The Offering by Grace McCleen (Sceptre) – British – 3rd novel
The Country of Ice Cream Star by Sandra Newman (Chatto & Windus) – British/American – 3rd novel
The Girl Who Was Saturday Night by Heather O’Neill (Quercus) – Canadian – 2nd novel
The Bees by Laline Paull (Fourth Estate) – British - 1st novel
The Table of Less Valued Knights by Marie Phillips (Jonathan Cape) – British – 2nd Novel
The Walk Home by Rachel Seiffert (Virago) – British – 3rd novel
A God in Every Stone by Kamila Shamsie (Bloomsbury) – Pakistani/British – 6th novel
How to be Both by Ali Smith (Hamish Hamilton) - British – 6th novel
The Shore by Sara Taylor (William Heinemann) – American – 1st novel
A Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler (Chatto & Windus) – American – 20th novel
The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters (Virago) – British – 6th novel
After Before by Jemma Wayne (Legend Press) – British – 1st novel
The Life of a Banana by PP Wong (Legend Press) – British – 1st novel
