Baileys Women’s Prize, Longlist
Announced Wednesday, International Women’s Day, as it has been since its founding in 1996, is the longlist of 16 titles for the Womens Prize for Fiction sponsored by Bailey’s.
As The Guardian points out, it is a list of established authors rather than new voices, “including three previous winners, four second novels and only three debuts, compared with 11 last year.” The full list is online.
Shortlisted for the Man Booker Award, Madeleine Thien’s Do Not Say We Have Nothing (Norton; Recorded Books; OverDrive Sample) swept Canada’s literary awards, taking the 2016 Scotiabank Giller Prize, an award worth $100,000 dollars, as well as the highly prestigious Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction.
The NYT calls it “a beautiful, sorrowful work. The book impresses in many senses: It stamps the memory with an afterimage; it successfully explores larger ideas about politics and art (the mind is never still while reading it); it has the satisfying, epic sweep of a 19th-century Russian novel, spanning three generations and lapping up against the shores of two continents.”
C.E. Morgan won the Kirkus Prize for The Sport of Kings (Macmillan/FSG;Macmillan Audio; OverDrive Sample), a title that was also a Carnegie Medal longlist selection.
Mary Gaitskill’s The Mare (PRH/Pantheon; Blackstone Audio; OverDrive Sample) racked up holds in libraries and was widely reviewed.
On Fresh Air, Maureen Corrigan said, “Mary Gaitskill writes tough … You have to write tough — and brilliantly — to pull off a novel like The Mare … a raw, beautiful story about love and mutual delusion, in which the fierce erotics of mother love and romantic love and even horse fever are swirled together.”
The New York Times Magazine featured Gaitskill in a lengthy profile, as did The New Yorker.
Other well-known authors on the list are Annie Proulx for Barkskins (S&S/Scribner; S&S Audio; OverDrive Sample), Margaret Atwood, Hag-Seed, (PRH/Hogarth; RH Audio/BOT; OverDrive Sample), as well as past winners, Eimear McBride, for The Lesser Bohemians, (PRH/Hogarth; RH Audio/BOT; OverDrive Sample), and Rose Remain, The Gustav Sonata, (Norton; HighBridge Audio; OverDrive Sample)
Two titles have yet to be published in the US, one of the three debuts on the list, Midwinter by Fiona Melrose and The Dark Circle by Linda Grant, who has won the prize before. Several others will arrive later this year:
First Love, Gwendoline Riley (Melville House) comes out on March 28
Stay with Me, Ayobami Adebayo (PRH/Knopf; RH Audio/BOT) arrives on August 22; a debut
The Power, Naomi Alderman (Hachette/Little, Brown) publishes on October 10.
The prize was created in 1996 by a group of U.K. reviewers, librarians and others in the book world, to address the fact that a disproportionate number of men won literary prizes.
The short list of six titles is expected in April. The winner will be announced on June 7th.
Attached is our spreadsheet of the titles, for use in ordering and creating displays, Bailey’s Longlist, 2017.