1996

A Spell of Winter - 1996 Winner

Helen Dunmore

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How to be both – 2015 Winner

Ali Smith

“If Woolf and Joyce hadn’t both died in 1941, you might think they had a secret love-child called Ali Smith. She explores our humanity with the most beautiful poetic prose.” Shami Chakrabarti, 2015 Women’s Prize for Fiction Chair of Judges.

How to be both is a novel all about art’s versatility. Borrowing from painting’s fresco technique to make an original literary double-take, it’s a fast-moving genre-bending conversation between forms, times, truths and fictions. There’s a renaissance artist of the 1460s. There’s the child of a child of the 1960s. Two tales of love and injustice twist into a singular yarn where time gets timeless, structural gets playful, knowing gets mysterious, fictional gets real – and all life’s givens get given a second chance.

"Art makes nothing happen in a way that makes something happen."

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2015 Shortlist

The Bees

Laline Paull

A God in Every Stone

Kamila Shamsie

How to be both - 2015 Winner

Ali Smith

A Spool of Blue Thread

Anne Tyler

The Paying Guests

Sarah Waters

Outline

2015 Longlist

The Life of a Banana

PP Wong

The Shore

Sara Taylor

The Walk Home

Rachel Seiffert

The Table of Less Valued Knights

Marie Phillips

The Country of Ice Cream Star

Sandra Newman

Station Eleven

Emily St. John Mandel

Elizabeth is Missing

Emma Healey

In the middle of a winter's night, a woman wraps herself in a blanket, picks up a pen and starts writing to an estranged friend. In answer to a question you asked a long time ago, she writes, and so begins a letter that calls up a shared past both women have preferred to forget. Without knowing if her friend, Butterfly, is even alive or dead, she writes night after night - a letter of friendship that turns into something more revealing and recriminating. By turns a belated outlet of rage, an act of self-defence, and an offering of forgiveness, the letter revisits a betrayal that happened a decade and a half before, and dissects what is left of a friendship caught between the forces of hatred and love. The thoughtfulness, intensity and sheer beauty of her writing in her first two novels, The Wilderness and All Is Song, brought Samantha Harvey both huge acclaim and many prize shortlistings. Those readers who loved those novels will fall on Dear Thief with relief and delight.

Dear Thief

Samantha Harvey

I Am China

Xiaolu Guo

Aren't We Sisters?

Patricia Ferguson

Crooked Heart

Lissa Evans