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Chidgey, Mason longlisted for 2022 Women’s Prize

Aotearoa New Zealand writers Catherine Chidgey and Meg Mason have been longlisted for the £30,000 (A$54,000) Women’s Prize for Fiction.

Chidgey, the author of six novels, is longlisted for Remote Sympathy, first published by Te Herenga Waka University Press in October 2020. The novel, published in the UK and Australia by Europa Editions, is set in and around a concentration camp in Germany during the second world war and its aftermath. Remote Sympathy was shortlisted for the 2021 Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction.

First published in Australia in late 2020, Sorrow and Bliss, the second novel from Sydney-based Mason, is set in London and Oxford, and follows a woman trying to make sense of the mental illness that’s plagued her for decades. The novel was published by HarperCollins in the US and Canada in February 2021 and by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in the UK in June 2021. Rights have been sold in over 20 countries, with US production company New Regency acquiring film and television rights last year.

Mason and Chidgey’s books are among 16 novels longlisted for the Women’s Prize. The other titles are:

  • Build Your House Around My Body (Violet Kupersmith, Oneworld)
  • Careless (Kirsty Capes, Orion)
  • Creatures of Passage (Morowa Yejidé, Jacaranda)
  • Flamingo (Rachel Elliott, Tinder Press)
  • Great Circle (Maggie Shipstead, Doubleday)
  • Salt Lick (Lulu Allison, Unbound Digital)
  • The Book of Form and Emptiness (Ruth Ozeki, Canongate)
  • The Bread the Devil Knead (Lisa Allen-Agostini, Myriad)
  • The Exhibitionist (Charlotte Mendelson, Mantle)
  • The Final Revival of Opal & Nev (Dawnie Walton, Quercus)
  • The Island of Missing Trees (Elif Shafak, Viking)
  • The Paper Palace (Miranda Cowley Heller, Viking)
  • The Sentence (Louise Erdrich, Corsair)
  • This One Sky Day (Leone Ross, Faber).

The longlist was chosen by a judging panel comprising author Mary Ann Sieghart (chair), journalist and editor Lorraine Candy, novelist, Dorothy Koomson, and journalists Anita Sethi and Pandora Sykes.

A shortlist of six will be announced on 27 April before the winner is announced on 15 June at a ceremony in central London.

The Women’s Prize is presented annually to the best novel of the year written in English by a woman. Last year’s winner was Susanna Clarke for Piranesi (Bloomsbury).

For more information about the longlist, click here.

 

Category: Local news