Shami Chakrabarti reveals Baileys women’s prize for fiction longlist

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.

Baileys women’s prize for fiction longlist 2015

Outline by Rachel Cusk (Faber and Faber) – British – 8th novel
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

The top 10 novels featuring works of art

A work of art can fire my imagination like nothing else. If I’m feeling stuck during the writing process, I look at a painting from the period I’m writing about and it’s usually enough to help me: a way into another place and time.

Looking at paintings was a central part of the research for my second book, The Widow’s Confession, a murder mystery set in a Kent seaside resort in 1851 – and not just because one of the characters is a painter. Ramsgate Sands (Life at the Seaside) by William Powell Frith was an influence during the genesis of the book, with its depiction of Victorian holidaymakers at play. But a range of paintings helped throughout the writing process: the seas and skies of Turner’s work for atmosphere; the detailed crowd scenes by Frith for costume and Victorian spectacle; and the beautiful but empty-eyed pre-Raphaelite stunners for ideals of feminine beauty.
Writing and art have been intertwined since time immemorial, but even as separate disciplines, they are natural kindling for each other: whether a work of art is the creative jump-start for a novel, a research source or a structural element in the plot.
Here’s my selection of novels that have drawn on works of art – some real, some imaginary – for fuel.
1. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (1891)
Wilde’s fin de siècle novel about a beautiful young man whose portrait grows old in a locked room while he stays young is a glorious indulgence of a read. When a besotted Basil Hallward paints the beautiful Dorian Gray, he fears that he has put too much of his own soul into the portrait. But it is Dorian, influenced by the fascinating sensualist, Lord Henry, who has gifted the painting something of himself. As the portrait ages, but Dorian does not, he becomes “a face without a heart”, seeking sensation and pleasure at any cost. Wilde’s depiction of the brittle, hedonistic world of eternal youth drips with decadence. The wittiest horror story ever written.
2. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (1927)
Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness meditation on life, love and the nature of memory is also a story about the uncertainty and struggle of creativity. In a summer when various guests come to stay with the Ramsays and their children, one guest, Lily Briscoe, begins a painting featuring Mrs Ramsay, who is the focus of her guests’ adoration. Ten years later, after Mrs Ramsay’s death, Lily returns and completes the painting, as the remainder of the family travels to the lighthouse. In the process she finds a way back into her memories of that summer, and her realisation that her beloved Mrs Ramsay had a way of drawing moments of revelation out of everyday life; she could make “life stand still” as an artist does.
3. Girl With a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier (1999)
The book that inspired a play, a film and thousands of mini-breaks to The Hague. Looking at the Vermeer painting of the same name, Chevalier was inspired by the latent intensity of the sitter’s gaze as it meets the viewer/artist. From this she creates the story of Griet, a servant girl who, through her interest in art, becomes close to her employer, Johannes Vermeer. The influence of Netherlandish art is clear in Chevalier’s luminous version of Delft and her subtle portrait of love and loss, as coolly lit as one of Vermeer’s paintings.
4. The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt (2013)
Theo Decker’s mother shows him her favourite painting in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and is killed moments later by an explosion. Theo survives, and is urged to take the painting – The Goldfinch by Carel Fabritius – by a dying man. As the years pass, Theo secretly keeps it with him, a symbol of purity and a link with his mother, in a troubled life. Tartt’s story of the power of a single painting, and of art as a whole, is delivered in dense, crackling prose.
5. My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk, translated by Erdağ Göknar (1998; translated 2001)
A vivid, multi-voiced story of 16th-century Istanbul centring around the murder of a miniaturist who is working on a secret book for the sultan. But this is no straightforward murder mystery; Pamuk explores death, love and the nature of Islamic art with immediacy and an awareness of its cultural resonance. A book which, like the best art, can be read on many levels.
6. The Moon and Sixpence by W Somerset Maugham (1919)
Charles Strickland, a stockbroker, deserts his wife and children to become a painter in Paris and Tahiti. Maugham’s writer-narrator observes Strickland’s story with puzzled bewilderment as he destroys the lives of those around him without qualms. Influenced by the life and work of Gauguin, this is a portrayal of the artist as monster, fuelled by a quasi-religious obsession to paint no matter what the consequences. Best read with a shot of absinthe.
7. Headlong by Michael Frayn (1999)
Following a single glance at an unidentified painting at his country neighbour’s house, Martin Clay believes he has discovered a lost painting by Bruegel the Elder. His machinations and expectations grow more grandiose, sending his life and marriage into disarray. Formidable art-historical research wrapped up in comedy.
8. Girl Reading by Katie Ward (2011)
This debut novel is comprised of seven sections, each based on a separate woman and her portrait. Ward spans six centuries and proves a deft creator of atmosphere, establishing each of her seven scenarios in moments with precision and sensitivity. Exploring art, reading and what it means to be a woman in the past, present and future, this is a haunting read.
9. The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey (1951)
“I can’t remember any murderer … who looked like him.” So says Alan Grant, a police inspector recovering from an operation in hospital, who is given a pile of portraits by a friend to keep him occupied. Grant considers himself an expert on faces, and is intrigued by one particular portrait, soliciting opinions from his doctor, nurses and visitors. When he discovers that the face belongs to Richard III, he decides to research the mystery of the princes in the Tower. This most unconventional of detective stories is enthralling and, for the record, I agree with him about that portrait.
10. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (1813)
One of our most treasured love stories, Pride and Prejudice is not a novel saturated with art, but a portrait provides one of its most important moments. When Elizabeth Bennet visits Pemberley (arguably a work of art in its own right, which may have been based on Chatsworth House) she begins to change her mind about Mr Darcy, the suitor she has previously spurned. A pivotal moment comes when she sees his portrait in the gallery. “She stood several minutes before the picture in earnest contemplation.” Possibly the moment she falls in love, which just goes to show that art changes lives in all kinds of ways.

Families in literature: The Lisbons in The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides

There is a photo of me at my second Christmas. I am somewhere between a baby and toddler, and still my parents’ only child, a title I would keep for another three precious years. Around me is so much swag that some of it towers above me, while an array of smaller boxes make me a little Godzilla, stomping around my city of gifts. I like to tease my parents about this photo. You ruined me for real life, I tell them. The Lisbon sisters of The Virgin Suicides don’t share this problem. Parental overindulgence is not something Mary, Therese, Bonnie, Cecila and Lux experience in their short lives, which we encounter through lovingly collated pieces of evidence by a group of boys from their suburban Michigan community. Their mother is an unfeeling, stifling disciplinarian, their father is weak and adrift in the sea of women around him. Over the course of a year, the book’s narrator and his friends bear witness as four Lisbon girls attempt to survive the suicide of Cecila, and its effect on the already startlingly spartan rule of their mother. As the girls try to integrate into normal life, the boys collect the pieces of information that will make up a lifelong investigation: reports from the orthodontist that Mary visits in the hope of fixing her teeth, inventories of mysterious feminine toiletries found during reconnaissance, memories of touch and conversation archived like rare historical documents.
The Virgin Suicides cleverly fakes being a book about teen suicide, but its real exploration is into the delicate dynamics that keep a family together. Before Cecilia, the “weird” sister, makes the swan dive into the yard that sparks off the suicides, the Lisbon family is at least a whole unit; their house is odd, ugly, but still functional. After the suicide, the parents lose hold of the children, and the girls lose their small freedoms. Mr Lisbon begins to see children as “only strangers you agreed to live with”, and the family home becomes an extension of its occupants’ relationships, emitting toxic smells, of “bad breath, cheese, milk, tongue film … the singed smell of drilled teeth”, or as one of the boys quips, “the smell of trapped beaver”. Meanwhile, adding a dreamlike, echoing quality to the Lisbon tragedy, the town’s beloved elms become diseased, and men arrive to cut them down. It’s hard not to note the symbolism as tree after tree is decapitated and torn out, infested with the virus from the first sick tree. What’s unclear, in the Lisbons’ case, is who carries the virus first – Cecilia, the mother, or generations of ancestors carrying a gene for depression.
While they live, the Lisbon sisters are observed in lots of ways, all of which reinforce their isolation. They are five copies of the same girl, or living myths, like the Kennedys. Sometimes they are five adjacent solitudes with cartoon-like personal quirks, like a bleak sibling version of the Spice Girls (the pretty one, the smart one, the weird one, the oldest, “mean one, pulling my hair …”). It’s no wonder the girls have no comfort but each other, and in the familiar pattern of their five, then four-starred, constellation. Anyone with siblings will recognise the casual way in which the Lisbons know, irritate and protect each other, and the wordless way in which they communicate. And it’s difficult to begrudge their togetherness in the end, even if we can’t understand their actions.
When my brother and sister arrived, I was humiliated, then suddenly their existence was impossible to live without. When I re-read The Virgin Suicides, as I often do, the thing that comes across is always this idea of sibling love, and the way it can be your source of understanding the generation above you, and the world. My love for my siblings is now bigger than a pile of presents, and more important than the most generous harvest of presents I ever had. I think it’s the thing that keeps me returning to this magical book.

Ebooks can tell which novels you didn't finish

The Goldfinch may have won Donna Tartt the Pulitzer, praised by judges as a novel which “stimulates the mind and touches the heart”, but the acclaimed title’s 800-odd pages appear to have intimidated British readers, with less than half of those who downloaded it from e-bookseller Kobo making it to the end.
New data from Kobo shows that, although The Goldfinch was the 37th bestselling ebook of the year for the retailer, it was completed by just 44.4% of Kobo’s British readers. Kobo speculated that it “likely proved daunting for some due to the length of the novel”.
Twelve Years a Slave, Solomon Northup’s account from 1853 of how he was kidnapped and sold into slavery – “I sighed for liberty; but the bondsman’s chain was round me, and could not be shaken off” – was, according to Kobo, similarly overwhelming. Ninth on their British bestseller list, following the hugely successful film adaptation, the book was completed by just 28.2% of British readers.
The onset of digital reading means that Kobo – and other ebook retailers – are able to tell more than ever before about how readers engage with books: which they leave unopened, which they read to the end, and how quickly they finish.
Earlier this year, the American mathematician Jordan Ellenberg proposed the so-called “Hawking Index” in a blog for the Wall Street Journal, using Amazon’s “Popular Highlights” feature in an attempt to pinpoint how far into novels readers were actually getting, but retailers have been reluctant to share the data they are harvesting themselves. Kobo’s first analysis of trends in e-reading, released on Wednesday, reveal an unexpected divide between bestsellers, and the books that readers actually complete.
After collecting data between January and November 2014 from more than 21m users, in countries including Canada, the US, the UK, France, Italy and the Netherlands, Kobo found that its most completed book of 2014 in the UK was not a Man Booker or Baileys prize winner. Instead, readers were most keen to finish Casey Kelleher’s self-published thriller Rotten to the Core, which doesn’t even feature on the overall bestseller list – although Kelleher has gone on to win a book deal with Amazon’s UK publishing imprint Thomas & Mercer after selling nearly 150,000 copies of her three self-published novels.
“Rotten to The Core by Casey Kelleher was the most completed book in the UK, with 83% of people reading it cover to cover,” said Kobo, “whereas the number one bestselling ebook in the UK, One Cold Night by Katia Lief [also a thriller] was only completed by 69% of those who read it.”
Kobo’s UK ebook bestseller list also features novels by major names including Gillian Flynn, John Green, James Patterson and Robert Galbraith, while its “most completed” list mixes romance, thrillers and erotica by the likes of Sylvia Day, Stella Rimington, Nora Roberts and Lynda La Plante. Kobo said that thriller powerhouse Patterson “was the most completed author in the UK for his entire portfolio of books”.
“A book’s position on the bestseller list may indicate it’s bought, but that isn’t the same as it being read or finished,” said Michael Tamblyn, president and chief content officer at Kobo. “A lot of readers have multiple novels on the go at any given time, which means they may not always read one book from start to finish before jumping into the next great story. People may wait days, months, or even until the following year to finish certain titles. And many exercise that inalienable reader’s right to set down a book if it doesn’t hold their interest.”
Kobo also revealed that the people of Britain were most likely to finish a romance novel, with 62% completion, followed by crime and thrillers (61%) and fantasy (60%). Italians were also most engaged by romance (74% completion), while the French preferred mysteries, with 70% completion.
Kobo’s UK Bestseller List
1.One Cold Night – Katia Lief
2. Gone Again – Doug Johnstone
3. Gone Girl – Gillian Flynn
4. The Fault in Our Stars – John Green
5. My Sister’s Keeper – Bill Benners
6. The Husband’s Secret – Liane Moriarty
7. The Cuckoo’s Calling – Robert Galbraith
8. Her Last Letter – Nancy C. Johnson
9. Twelve Years a Slave – Solomon Northup
10. Bloody Valentine – James Patterson
Kobo’s most completed books of 2014
1. Rotten to the Core - Casey Kelleher
2. The Tycoon’s Vacation – Melody Anne
3. The Traitor – Kimberley Chambers
4. Concealed in Death – JD Robb
5. Wrongful Death - Lynda La Plante
6. All Revved Up - Sylvia Day
7. Present Danger - Stella Rimington
8. The Empty Cradle - Rosie Goodwin
9. The Witness - Nora Roberts
10. The Promise (Fallen Star Series, Book 4) – Jessica Sorensen

Reading the Guardian first book award longlist: rewards and revelations

For the readers’ group helping to assess the 2014 contenders, it’s been a sometimes arduous but always enjoyable journey

'Vigorous debate' ...the first book award longlist. Photograph: Graham Turner for the Guardian
We started with Fiona McFarlane’s tiger on the coast of New South Wales and we finished eight weeks later in the company of the volatile “young skins” of Glanbeigh, having travelled to Colin Barrett’s fictional west of Ireland town via the new China with Evan Osnos, and from Kabul to London via Oxford, New York and Islamabad with Zia Haider Rahman. On the way we followed Gruff Rhys as he traced his farmhand ancestor’s search for a fabled tribe of Welsh-speaking Native Americans and we spent time with Marion Coutts, sharing her pain, frustration and love as her husband, the art critic Tom Lubbock, experienced the debilitating effects of a brain tumour.
The brain and its workings returned several times: Henry Marsh showed us what it was like to operate on its “soft white substance … moving through thought itself” while Matthew Thomas in his novel We Are Not Ourselves presented us with a closely observed study of what happens when Marsh’s “jelly” falls victim to dementia. We learnt new ways of interpreting architecture from Tom Wilkinson’s Bricks and Mortals, and encountered brilliant new approaches to the short story in May-Lan Tan’s Things To Make and Break, which made it to the longlist as the Guardian readers’ choice.

We were the six readers who made up this year’s Lewes readers’ group for the Guardian first book award. We’d been invited to take part in judging this year’s competition early in September, after applying to our local Waterstones, and for eight weeks the pile of 11 hardbacks we’d been presented with after joining the group dominated our reading lives. We’d read whenever and wherever we could, particularly in week four, when Lucie from Waterstones paired the dark novel After Me Comes the Flood with the emotionally draining memoir The Iceberg, and in Week six, when the 620 pages of We Are Not Ourselves tested our endurance while at the same time filling us with admiration for the skilled way in which Matthew Thomas steered us through his central characters’ experiences of marriage, ambition and loss.

The knowledge that the writers of these books had lots weighing on our choices meant that we took each book extremely seriously. There’s a £10,000 award for the winner, and all of the writers can be assured that as readers we held each book up to the light and discussed its strengths and weaknesses in full.

There were vigorous good-humoured debates about each of the 11 books on the longlist. We finished by ranking them at a meeting in the shop, watched over as we did so by less distinguished titles such as Dogs in Cars. We judged the books ultimately on how they had ranked as reading experiences. Style mattered, as did story; the fiction titles had to make us care about their characters and believe in the worlds they created, whilst the non-fiction ones needed to have a shape which gave coherence to their interests and concerns and make those concerns engage our attention and interest.

Some needed a little more editorial discipline in order to reign in their enthusiasm for lengthy footnotes or tortuous sub-plots. Strangely, given the rich variety of fiction and non-fiction we had to choose from, we didn’t disagree by much and our choices were satisfyingly mirrored in the shortlist published last Saturday. The shortlisted books don’t tell the whole story, however; no one reading In The Light of What We Know, with its epic coverage of nations breaking up and its searching exploration of love, science, faith and war, could feel that they were experiencing anything less than the arrival of a major new literary talent, and likewise the bizarre and mysterious world created by Sarah Perry in After Me Comes the Flood makes for a highly original and disturbing experience.

All that’s left for us now is to attend Wednesday’s award ceremony in London. We’ll enjoy being there and we’re all looking forward to a chance to meet the authors and find out who our fellow readers were. We know who we think deserves to win, and we’ll be glad to share in the celebrations, but we’ll miss our weekly meetings and we’ll miss the challenges that come with reading so many books in such a short time.

Watch out forthe result: the winner will have come through a really tough and demanding judging process and the first book award will be just one of many still to come!

• The winner is announced at 8pm. Peter Shears was part of the Lewes Waterstones reading group. With thanks to Lucie, Bridget, Anna, Barbara, Ian and Tessa