Women’s Fiction Prize Longlist
The longlist of 20 titles for the Baileys’ Womens Prize for Fiction was announced on Tuesday, International Women’s Day. The prize was created in 1996 by a group of U.K. reviewers, librarians and others in the book world, to address the issue of book prizes being disproportionately awarded to men. Now funded by R & A Bailey & Co, makers of Bailey’s Irish Cream, it is open to any woman writing in English
We were pleased to see one of the debuts on the list was part of our First Flights/Penguin Debut Authors program. Jackie Copleton, the author of A Dictionary of Mutual Understanding (PRH/Penguin Books, Dec., 2015), a novel about survivors coping with the effects of the bombing of Nagasaki, chatted with librarians in the program late last year.
Many authors with more novels under their belts, are on the list, including Elizabeth Strout, My Name Is Lucy Barton (a number one LibraryReads pick) Geraldine Brooks, The Secret Chord, Anne Enright, The Green Road, Kate Atkinson, A God in Ruins, and Attica Locke, Pleasantville
Also on the list is a second novel that received a great deal of attention last year, A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara.
Libraries own most of the titles (three have not been released in the U.S.). Attached is our spreadsheet of the titles, for use in creating displays, Baileys Longlist, 2016