Toronto-based author Sheila Heti has made the longlist for this year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction for her 2010 novel, How Should a Person Be? (House of Anansi Press). Formerly known as the Orange Prize, the annual award celebrates “excellence, originality, and accessibility in women’s writing.”
Judged by Miranda Richardson, Jojo Moyes, Natasha Walter, Rachel Johnson, and Razia Iqbal, the winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction will receive a cheque for £30,000 and a limited-edition bronze figurine known as a “Bessie.”
Orange, the U.K. phone company, pulled its sponsorship in May. According to the Women’s Prize website, this year’s award is being “privately funded” in the form of “gifts from companies and individual donors.”
The finalists will be announced April 16 at the London Book Fair, and the winner revealed June 5. A new sponsor will be announced at the awards ceremony.
The rest of the longlist:
- Kitty Aldridge, A Trick I Learned From Dead Men (Jonathan Cape)
- Kate Atkinson, Life After Life (Doubleday U.K.)
- Ros Barber, The Marlowe Papers (Sceptre/Hodder & Stoughton)
- Shani Boianjiu, The People of Forever are Not Afraid (Bond Street Books)
- Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl (Crown)
- A.M. Homes, May We Be Forgiven (Viking Canada)
- Barbara Kingsolver, Flight Behavior (HarperCollins)
- Deborah Copaken Kogan, The Red Book (Hyperion Books)
- Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies (HarperCollins)
- Bonnie Nadzam, Lamb (Other Press)
- Emily Perkins, The Forrests (Bond Street Books)
- Michèle Roberts, Ignorance (Bloomsbury)
- Francesca Segal, The Innocents (HarperCollins)
- Maria Semple, Where’d You Go, Bernadette (Back Bay Books)
- Elif Shafak, Honour (Viking)
- Zadie Smith, NW (Hamish Hamilton)
- M.L. Stedman, The Light Between Oceans (Scribner)
- Carrie Tiffany, Mateship with Birds (Picador)
- G. Willow Wilson, Alif the Unseen (McClelland & Stewart)