Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction 2015 longlist announced

11 March 2015 Books+Publishing

The longlist for the 2015 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction, previously known as the Orange Prize for Fiction, has been announced.

This year’s longlisted titles are:

Outline (Rachel Cusk, Faber)
Crooked Heart (Lissa Evans, Doubleday)
Aren’t We Sisters? (Patricia Ferguson, Penguin)
I Am China (Xiaolu Guo, Chatto & Windus)
Dear Thief (Samantha Harvey, Jonathan Cape)
Elizabeth Is Missing (Emma Healey, Viking)
Station Eleven (Emily St. John Mandel, Picador)
The Offering (Grace McCleen, Hodder & Stoughton)
The Country of Ice Cream Star (Sandra Newman, Vintage)
The Girl Who Was Saturday Night (Heather O’Neill, Quercus)
The Bees (Laline Paull, Fourth Estate)
The Table of Less Valued Knights (Marie Phillips, Jonathan Cape)
The Walk Home (Rachel Seiffert, Virago)
A God in Every Stone (Kamila Shamsie, Bloomsbury)
How to Be Both (Ali Smith, Penguin)
The Shore (Sara Taylor, William Heinemann)
A Spool of Blue Thread (Anne Tyler, Chatto & Windus)
The Paying Guests (Sarah Waters, Virago)
After Before (Jemma Wayne, Legend Press)
The Life of a Banana (P P Wong, Legend Press).

Of the 20 books to make this year’s longlist, five are from debut authors and eight from previously shortlisted authors.

This year’s chair of judges Shami Chakrabarti said it was ‘a particularly strong [year] for women’s fiction’ and that the longlist was one ‘to be proud of—with its mix of genres and styles, first-timers and well-known names from around the world’.

A shortlist of six books will be announced on 13 April, ahead of the winner’s announcement on 3 June.

The £30,000 (A$59,253) prize was established in 1996 and is presented annually to the best novel of the year written in English by a woman. Irish author Eimear McBride won last year’s award for A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing (Text).

For more information about the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction, visit the website here.

Category: International news