Smith wins 2015 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction

Scottish author Ali Smith has won the 2015 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction for her novel How to be Both (Penguin). Smith’s book was chosen from a shortlist of six, which included: Outline (Rachel Cusk, Faber); The Bees (Laline Paull, HarperCollins); A God in Every Stone (Kamila Shamsie, Bloomsbury); A Spool of Blue Thread (Anne Tyler, Chatto & Windus); and The Paying Guests (Sarah Waters, Virago). Smith was named the winner of the prize, which is worth £30,000 (A$59,123), at an event in London on 3 June. Chair of the judging panel Shami Chakrabati described the winning novel, whose dual narrative follows ‘a renaissance artist of the 1460s’ and ‘a child of a child of the 1960s’, as ‘a wonderful juxtaposition between ancient and modern, the particular and the universal’. How to be Both was previously shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Folio Prize, and won the Goldsmiths Award and the Costa Novel Award.

Category: International news