The Women’s Prize for Fiction shortlist has been announced! The shortlist celebrates six incredible titles, including Readings' bestsellers Miranda July and Elizabeth Strout, and upcoming Melbourne Writers Festival guest, Yael van der Wouden. Discover the shortlist below, or check out the full longlist here.
Kit de Waal, the Chair of Judges, said about this year's selection:
'Over the past three decades the Women’s Prize for Fiction has celebrated imaginative, accomplished novels year after year, and in doing so has helped change the landscape for fiction writing in the UK. Over the past six months, my fellow judges and I have been knee-deep in reading our submissions, consumed by the fully-realised worlds created by an incredible range of voices. Now that we arrive at the announcement of our shortlist, what seems absolutely apparent to me is how perfectly each of these six novels exemplify the original tenets of the Prize: originality, accessibility and sheer brilliance. Our selection celebrates rich, multi-layered narratives that will surprise, move and delight the reader, all drawing on, in different ways, the importance of human connection. What is surprising and refreshing is to see so much humour, nuance and lightness employed by these novelists to shed light on challenging concepts. I’m in no doubt that these six novels will become the classics of the future.'
The 2025 Women's Prize for Fiction shortlist:
Good Girl
Aria Aber
In Berlin's underground, where techno rattles buildings still scarred with the violence of the last century, nineteen-year-old Nila finds her tribe. In their company she can escape the parallel city that made her, the public housing block packed with refugees and immigrants, where the bathrooms are infested with silverfish and the walls outside are graffitied with swastikas.
And then Nila meets American writer Marlowe Woods, whose literary celebrity, though fading, opens her eyes to a world of patrons and festivals, one that imbues her dreams of life as an artist with new possibility. But as she finds herself drawn further into his orbit and ugly, barely submerged tensions begin to roil and claw beneath the city's cosmopolitan veneer, everything she hopes for, hates, and believes about herself will be challenged.
All Fours
Miranda July
A semi-famous artist announces her plan to drive cross-country from LA to NY. Thirty minutes after leaving her husband and child at home, she spontaneously exits the freeway, beds down in a nondescript motel and immerses herself in a temporary reinvention that turns out to be the start of an entirely different journey.
Miranda July's second novel confirms the brilliance of her unique approach to fiction. With July's wry voice, perfect comic timing, unabashed curiosity about human intimacy and palpable delight in pushing boundaries, All Fours tells the story of one woman's quest for a new kind of freedom.
The Persians
Sanam Mahloudji
Meet the women of the Valiat family. In Iran, they were somebodies. In America, they're nobodies.
First there is Elizabeth, the regal matriarch who remained in Tehran despite the revolution. Across the ocean in America, Elizabeth’s daughters have built new lives for themselves. There’s Shirin, a charismatic and flamboyantly high-flying event planner in Houston; and Seema, a dreamy idealist turned bored housewife languishing in the privileged hills of Los Angeles. And then there's the other granddaughter, Bita, a disillusioned law student spending her days in New York trying to find deeper meaning by giving away her worldly belongings.
When an annual vacation in Aspen goes wildly awry and Shirin ends up being bailed out of jail by Bita, the family's brittle upper class veneer is cracked wide open. Soon, Shirin must embark upon a grand quest to restore the family name to its former glory. But what does that mean in a country where the Valiats never even mattered? Can they bring their old inheritance into a new tomorrow?
Tell Me Everything
Elizabeth Strout
It's autumn in Maine, and the town lawyer Bob Burgess has become enmeshed in an unfolding murder investigation, defending a lonely, isolated man accused of killing his mother. He has also fallen into a deep and abiding friendship with the acclaimed writer, Lucy Barton, who lives nearby in a house next to the sea. Together, Lucy and Bob talk about their lives, their hopes and regrets, and what might have been. Lucy, meanwhile, befriends one of Crosby's longest inhabitants, Olive Kitteridge, now living in a retirement community on the edge of town. They spend afternoons together in Olive's apartment, telling each other stories. Stories about people they have known – 'unrecorded lives', Olive calls them – reanimating them, and, in the process, imbuing their lives with meaning.
Brimming with empathy and pathos, Tell Me Everything is Elizabeth Strout operating at the height of her powers, illuminating the ways in which our relationships keep us afloat.
The Safekeep
Yael van der Wouden
It's fifteen years since the Second World War and the rural Dutch province of Overijssel is quiet. Bomb craters have been filled, buildings reconstructed, and the conflict is well and truly over. Living alone in her late mother's country home, Isabel's life is as it should be – led by routine and discipline. But all is upended when her brother Louis delivers his graceless new girlfriend, Eva, at Isabel's doorstep – as a guest, there to stay for the season …
Eva is Isabel's antithesis – she sleeps late, wakes late, walks loudly through the house and touches things she shouldn't. In response Isabel develops a fury-fuelled obsession, and when things start disappearing around the house – a spoon, a knife, a bowl – Isabel's suspicions spiral out of control. In the sweltering heat of summer, Isabel's desperate desire for order transforms into infatuation – leading to a discovery that unravels all she has ever known. The war might not be well and truly over after all, and neither Eva – nor the house – are what they seem.
Fundamentally
Nussaibah Younis
When academic Nadia is disowned by her puritanical mother and dumped by her lover, she decides to make a getaway – accepting a UN job in Iraq. Tasked with rehabilitating ISIS women, Nadia becomes mired in the opaque world of international aid, surrounded by bumbling colleagues.
But then Nadia meets Sara, a precocious and sweary East Londoner who joined ISIS at just fifteen, and she is struck by how similar their stories are. Both from a Muslim background, both feisty and opinionated, with a shared love of Dairy Milk and rude pick-up lines, Sara and Nadia immediately connect and a powerful friendship forms. When Sara confesses a secret, Nadia is forced to make a difficult choice.
The winner of the Women's Prize for Fiction will be awarded on Thursday 12th June. Find out more about the prize here.
