Nigeria’s Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s latest novel, Americanah, a feminist yarn about Ifemelu and the world around her, has been longlisted for the first longlist of the newly named Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction, a literary prize for women writers around the world.
Previously known as the Orange Prize for Fiction, this year’s list offers a great sweep of geography, genre and style. Former winners Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2007) of Nigeria and Suzanne Berne (1999) of the United States are on the long list, which also contains six debut novels.
The other long-listed authors are from Britain, Canada, Ireland and Pakistan.
US writer A.M. Holmes won last year’s prize with “May We Be Forgiven”.
Five judges were tasked with the responsibility of choosing 20 books for the longlist out of the one 158 books submitted.
In some previous years – when the prize existed under the auspices of Orange – there was little overlap between this list and that of others such as the Man Booker or the Costa. In others, the overlap has been critical: last year Hilary Mantel was expected to receive a third nod, having won the Man Booker and the Costa, and the idea of her scooping up all the prizes became contentious.
Some critics wondered whether there should still be a prize restricted to women when recently women have been in the majority on every significant literary list.
Now in its 19th year, this year’s Baileys prize longlist which was announced on International Women’s Day, honours both rising stars of literature and well-established writers, and features six debut writers, as well as two previous winners, Adichie and Suzanne Berne.
There is an impressive number of debut novels on the list:
• Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah (Fourth Estate)
• Margaret Atwood, MaddAddam (Bloomsbury)
• Suzanne Berne, The Dogs of Littlefield (Fig Tree)
• Fatima Bhutto, The Shadow of the Crescent Moon (Viking)
• Claire Cameron, The Bear (Harvill Secker)
• Lea Carpenter, Eleven Days (Two Roads)
• M.J. Carter, The Strangler Vine (Fig Tree)
• Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries (Granta)
• Deborah Kay Davies, Reasons She Goes to the Woods (Oneworld)
• Elizabeth Gilbert, The Signature of All Things (Bloomsbury)
• Hannah Kent, Burial Rites (Picador)
• Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers (Harvill Secker)
• Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowland (Bloomsbury)
• Audrey Magee, The Undertaking (Atlantic Books)
• Eimear McBride, A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing (Gallery Beggar Press)
• Charlotte Mendelson, Almost English (Mantle)
• Anna Quindlen, Still Life with Bread Crumbs (Hutchinson)
• Elizabeth Strout, The Burgess Boys (Simon and Schuster)
• Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch (Little, Brown)
• Evie Wyld, All The Birds, Singing (Jonathan Cape)
Penguin Books UK’s Managing Director Helen Fraser chairs the five-woman judging panel, whose other members include the classicist Mary Beard, the television news anchor Sophie Raworth, the novelist Denise Mina and Caitlin Moran, an author and columnist for The Times of London.
Fraser said: “This is a fantastic selection of books of the highest quality – intensely readable, gripping, intelligent and surprising – that you would want to press on your friends, and the judges have been doing just that.”
Fraser also told The Guardian: “It is a very interesting, exciting, diverse and in some ways surprising list. We felt that each one of these books is one you could confidently put in somebody else’s hands and say you will have a fantastic reading experience. You will really enjoy this book. Enjoyability is very high on the list.”
The judging panel will announce the short list on April 7.
The judges must now whittle these 20 books to six, before choosing an overall winner to be announced on June 4, 2014. The winner of the prize will be announced at the Royal Festival Hall in London on June 4 and will receive £30,000 ($50,000, 36,500 euros) and a bronze statuette known as “Bessie”.
