With six nationalities represented and six debuts this year, the Women’s Prize for Fiction plans a July winner’s announcement after a shortlist in April.
The Women’s Prize for Fiction’s big longlist comprises 16 titles. Image: Women’s Prize
An Award Program in Its 26th Year
Overnight in London, the Women’s Prize for Fiction has announced its 2021 longlist with 16 titles to be winnowed down to six for the shortlist, to be announced April 28. The winner is expected to be named this year on July 7.
The purse for that winner will be worth £30,000 (US$41,926) and is endowed by an anonymous donor. The winner also traditionally receives the limited edition “Bessie” figurine made and donated by artist Grizel Niven.
The Women s Prize for Fiction has made history by including a trans woman in its 2021 longlist.
Torrey Peters has been listed for her debut novel Detransition, Baby, months after organisers faced fierce criticism for announcing entries will be accepted from anyone legally defined as a woman.
Detransition, Baby follows trans women Reese and Amy as they attempt to navigate forming an unconventional family when Amy de-transitions to become Ames and fathers a child from an affair with his boss Katrina.
In October, organisers of the prestigious award were accused of putting women s rights last as they extended the award to all women .
Jones evocation of Barbados is exquisite, her brushwork assured, as she portrays pink sands and gated villas, decrepit hospitals and 24-hour convenience
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Rare is the first book that reveals the writer fully formed, the muscles and sinews of her sentences firm and taut, the voice distinctly her own think Imbolo Mbue’s “Behold the Dreamers” or Casey Cep’s “Furious Hours.” But Cherie Jones’s lavish, cinematic debut, “How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House,” rises to that high bar, its beguiling title a steppingstone into a Barbados that’s both Caribbean paradise and a crime-riddled underworld. Which is to say: The novel’s a stunner.
“How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House” is mostly set in Barbados during the sultry summer of 1984. Eighteen-year-old Stella, known as Lala to all but her grandmother Wilma, is about to give birth to her first child. Her husband, Adan, a professional thief, is a “giant” of a man, all swagger. They live in a rickety stilt-house at the fringe of Baxter’s Beach, an affluent resort that caters to foreign, predominantly White, tourists, an Eden where “you can watch the e