2022 Women's Prize For Fiction Shortens Its Contestants' List

2022 Women's Prize for Fiction has announced its shortlist narrowing down the contestants to six. According to the press release, "the shortlist incorporates a range of themes including belonging and identity; the power of nature; the burden of history; personal freedom; sisterhood; mental illness; ghosts; gender violence; and the opportunity for renewal. The novels also offer globe-spanning settings, from Antarctica to Montana, Cyprus to Trinidad."

As stated by the famous writer and the chair of judges Mary Ann Sieghart, "We were blessed with an extraordinarily high quality of submissions this year, which made whittling down the longlist from 16 to six particularly difficult. But the shortlist contains a wonderfully diverse range of stories, subjects, settings and authors, from the experience of a Native American woman in a haunted bookshop to an early female aviator in the Antarctic. One novel is narrated by a tree; another by a book. Some are laugh-out-loud funny, others tearful, and sometimes the two are combined in the same book. We judges have loved reading them all and we commend them to you as the best fiction written by women and published in the past year. Our only problem now will be to identify the winner out of these six brilliant novels."

Here are the shortlisted novels:

Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead

Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason

The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki

The Bread the Devil Knead by Lisa Allen-Agostini

The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak

The Sentence by Louise Erdrich

The winner of this year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction will be awarded on 15 June 2022.

Source: https://womensprizeforfiction.co.uk/