Cynthia Bond: Ruby
Anne Enright: The Green Road
Lisa McInerney: The Glorious Heresies
Elizabeth McKenzie: The Portable Veblen
Hannah Rothschild: The Improbability of Love
Hanya Yanagihara: A Little Life
The judges for the 2016 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction are:
Margaret Mountford, (Chair), Lawyer and Businesswoman
Naga Munchetty, Broadcast Journalist
Laurie Penny, Writer and Journalist
Elif Shafak, Author
Tracey Thorn, Writer and Singer
This year’s shortlist, announced this evening (Monday 11 April) at an event at The Weston Roof Pavilion at The Royal Festival Hall, central London, hosted by novelist and Co-Founder of the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction, Kate Mosse, features one previously shortlisted author and three debut novels.
“After a long and often passionate debate we are proud to present our 2016 shortlist,” said Margaret Mountford, Chair of judges. “Our choices reflect a really diverse mix of brilliant writing from new and established authors around the world and we hope that everyone will find much to enjoy in them.”
Syl Saller, Chief Marketing Officer, Diageo commented, “What a range of beautifully crafted and excellent stories originating from Ireland to Texas – the judges have selected a truly exciting range of novels for this year’s shortlist. In partnership with the Women’s Prize, Baileys is thrilled to celebrate these inspiring female authors and bring the pleasure of their writing to readers across the world.”
Set up in 1996 to celebrate and promote international fiction by women throughout the world to the widest range of readers possible, the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction 2016 is awarded for the best novel of the year written by a woman. Any woman writing in English – whatever her nationality, country of residence, age or subject matter – is eligible.
The winner will be presented with a cheque for £30,000 and a limited edition bronze statue known as ‘the Bessie’, created by artist Grizel Niven. Both are anonymously endowed.
The award ceremony will take place in The Clore Ballroom, Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre, London, on 8 June 2016.
Previous winners are – Ali Smith for How to be Both (2015), Eimear McBride for A Girl is a Half-formed Thing (2014), A.M. Homes for May We Be Forgiven (2013), Madeline Miller for The Song of Achilles (2012), Téa Obreht for The Tiger’s Wife (2011), Barbara Kingsolver for The Lacuna (2010), Marilynne Robinson for Home (2009), Rose Tremain for The Road Home (2008), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie for Half of a Yellow Sun (2007), Zadie Smith for On Beauty (2006), Lionel Shriver for We Need to Talk About Kevin (2005), Andrea Levy for Small Island (2004), Valerie Martin for Property (2003), Ann Patchett for Bel Canto (2002), Kate Grenville for The Idea of Perfection (2001), Linda Grant for When I Lived in Modern Times (2000), Suzanne Berne for A Crime in the Neighbourhood (1999), Carol Shields for Larry’s Party (1998), Anne Michaels for Fugitive Pieces (1997), and Helen Dunmore for A Spell of Winter (1996).
www.womensprizeforfiction.co.uk
@BaileysPrize #BaileysPrize
For more information or to request an interview with one or more of the shortlisted authors or Elif Shafak, Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction 2016 judge, please contact:
Amanda Johnson:
Tel: 07715 922 180
Email: amanda@amandajohnsonpr.com
Images of the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction 2016 shortlisted books and the authors are available to download here: https://onedrive.live.com/redir?resid=9F4C6D94FF51CE9E!549&authkey=!ANcmUPpEq5d-DJw&ithint=folder%2cjpg
BAILEYS and the Prize share a mutual purpose, to celebrate the best female storytellers and share the pleasure of their writing with ever-wider audiences.
BAILEYS was the world’s first cream liqueur, the perfect balancing act of aged Irish whiskey woven with fresh Irish dairy cream, a hint of cocoa and vanilla. It’s also the world’s biggest seller, with over 82 million bottles sold worldwide each year. Every minute of every day over 2000 people around the world are enjoying a BAILEYS.
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Celebrating life, every day, everywhere.
Cynthia Bond, Ruby
Two Roads
Ephram Jennings has never forgotten the beautiful girl with the long braids running through the piney woods of Liberty, their small East-Texas town. For Ruby Bell, Liberty was a place of devastating violence from which she fled to seedy, glamorous 1950s New York.
Years later, pulled back home, thirty-year-old Ruby is faced with the seething hatred of a town desperate to destroy her. Witnessing her struggle, Ephram must choose between loyalty to the sister who raised him and the chance for a life with the woman he has loved since he was a boy.
Cynthia Bond has taught writing to homeless and at-risk youth throughout Los Angeles for over fifteen years. She attended Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, then moved to New York and attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. Cynthia acted for many years in New York with the Negro Ensemble Company. A PEN Rosenthal Fellow, Cynthia founded the Blackbird Writing Collective in 2011. At present, Bond teaches therapeutic writing at Paradigm Malibu Adolescent Treatment Center. A native of East Texas, she lives in Los Angeles with her daughter.
Anne Enright, The Green Road
Vintage
The children of Rosaleen Madigan leave the west of Ireland for lives they never could have imagined, in Dublin, New York and various third-world towns. In her early old age their difficult, wonderful mother announces that she’s decided to sell the house and divide the proceeds. Her adult children come back for a last Christmas, with the feeling that their childhoods are being erased, their personal history bought and sold.
Anne Enright was born in Dublin, where she now lives and works. She has published two books of stories, collected as Yesterday’s Weather, one book of non-fiction, Making Babies, and five novels, including The Gathering, which was the Irish Novel of the Year, and won the Irish Fiction Award and the 2007 Man Booker Prize, and The Forgotten Waltz, which was awarded the Andrew Carnegie Media for Excellence in Fiction and shortlisted for the 2012 Orange Prize for Fiction. In 2015 she was appointed the first Laureate for Irish Fiction.
Lisa McInerney, The Glorious Heresies
John Murray
One messy murder affects the lives of five misfits who exist on the fringes of Ireland’s post-crash society. Ryan is a fifteen-year-old drug dealer desperate not to turn out like his alcoholic father Tony, whose obsession with this unhinged next-door neighbour threatens to ruin him and his family. Georgie is a prostitute whose willingness to feign a religious conversion has dangerous repercussions, while Maureen, the accidental murderer, has returned to Cork after forty years in exile to discover that Jimmy, the son she was forced to give up years before, has grown into the most fearsome gangster in the city. In seeking atonement for the murder and a multitude of perceived sins, Maureen threatens to destroy everything her son has worked so hard for, while her actions risk bringing the intertwined lives of the Irish underworld into the spotlight…
Lisa McInerney is from Galway and is the author of award-winning blog ‘Arse End of Ireland’. Her debut novel, The Glorious Heresies, was named as a book of the year by The Irish Times, Sunday Independent and Sunday Business Post and has been longlisted for the 2016 Dylan Thomas Prize and Desmond Elliott Prize. Her short stories have featured in The Stinging Fly, on BBC Radio 4 and in the anthologies The Long Gaze Back, edited by Sinéad Gleeson, and Town and Country, edited by Kevin Barry.
Elizabeth McKenzie, The Portable Veblen
Fourth Estate
Meet Veblen: a passionate defender of the anti-consumerist views of her name-sake, the iconoclastic economist Thorstein Veblen. She’s an experienced cheerer-upper (mainly of her narcissistic, hypochondriac, controlling mother), an amateur translator of Norwegian, and a firm believer in the distinct possibility that the plucky grey squirrel following her around can understand more than it lets on.
Meet her fiancé, Paul: the son of good hippies who were bad parents, a no-nonsense, high-flying neuroscientist with no time for squirrels. His recent work on a device to minimize battlefield trauma has led him dangerously close to the seductive Cloris Hutmacher, heiress to a pharmaceuticals empire, who is promising him fame and fortune through a shady-sounding deal with the Department of Defence. What could possibly go wrong?
Elizabeth McKenzie is the author of a story collection, Stop That Girl, and one previous novel, MacGregor Tells the World, and is the editor of My Postwar Life. The Portable Veblen is her first book to be published in the UK. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, Best American Nonrequired Reading, and the Pushcart Prize anthology, and has been recorded for NPR’s Selected Shorts. She is an editor of the Chicago Literary Review and Managing Editor of the Catamaran Literary Reader. She lives in Santa Cruz, California.
Hannah Rothschild, The Improbability of Love
Bloomsbury
When lovelorn Annie McDee stumbles across a dirty painting in a junk shop while looking for a present for an unsuitable man, she has no idea what she has discovered. Soon she finds herself drawn unwillingly into the tumultuous London art world, populated by exiled Russian oligarchs, avaricious Sheikas, desperate auctioneers and unscrupulous dealers, all scheming to get their hands on her painting – a lost eighteenth-century masterpiece called ‘The Improbability of Love’. Delving into the painting’s past, Annie will uncover not just an illustrious list of former owners, but some of the darkest secrets of European history – and in doing so she might just learn to open up to the possibility of falling in love again.
Hannah Rothschild is a writer and film director. Her documentary feature films have appeared on the BBC and HBO and at international film festivals. She has written film scripts for Ridley Scott and Working Title, and articles for Vanity Fair, the New York Times, Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue and others. Her first book, The Baroness, a biography, was published in 2012 and has been translated into six languages. She is the Chair of the National Gallery, a trustee of the Tate Gallery and Waddesdon Manor, and a Vice President of the Hay Literary Festival. The Improbability of Love, her first novel, was a BBC Radio 2 Book Club pick, one of the Guardian‘s Best Books of 2015 and has been shortlisted for the 2016 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize. She lives in London.
Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life
Picador
When four classmates from a small Massachusetts college move to New York to make their way, they’re broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition. There is kind, handsome Willem, an aspiring actor; JB, a quick-witted, sometimes cruel painter pursuing fame in the art world; Malcolm, a frustrated architect at a prominent firm; and withdrawn, brilliant, enigmatic Jude, who serves as their centre of gravity.
Over the decades, their relationships deepen and darken, tinged by addiction, success, and pride. Yet their greatest challenge, each comes to realize, is Jude himself, by midlife a terrifyingly talented lawyer yet an increasingly broken man, his mind and body scarred by an unspeakable childhood, and haunted by a degree of trauma that he fears he will not only be unable to overcome – but that will define his life forever.
Hanya Yanagihara was born in LA, USA in 1975. Yanagihara is the author of The People in the Trees, shortlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction and her novel A Little Life was shortlisted for the 2015 Man Booker Prize. She is Deputy Editor at T Magazine, New York Times and lives in New York City.
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