The UK’s Folio Prize, now in its second year, announced its longlist and it certainly lives up to its name, with a field of 80 fiction titles selected by the Folio Prize Academy, a group of writers and critics whose members read like a who’s who of literary fiction super stars.

The Prize was created in response to the 2011 Man Booker Prize shortlist, considered by some in the UK book scene as more “readable” than “literary.” Here is the entire 2011 Man Booker Prize list (long, short, and winner), in case you want to speculate on which titles triggered the debate.

Given the fuss, the Folio Prize longlist is remarkably similar to this year’s Booker longlist and includes the winner, Richard Flanagan’s
The Narrow Road to the Deep North. Also included are many of the titles that appeared on this year’s National Book Awards fiction longlist, but not the winner, Redeployment by Phil Klay.

The Folio shortlist will be announced on Feb. 9 and the winner on March 23, 2015. Last year’s winner was George Saunders for Tenth of December.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 16th, 2014 at 11:30 am and is filed under Awards. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.