The Women's Prize for Fiction shortlist 2023
The shortlist for the 2023 Women’s Prize for Fiction has been announced! The Women’s Prize for Fiction celebrates excellence, originality and accessibility in women’s writing from throughout the world. The winner receives a cheque for £30,000 and a limited edition bronze figurine known as a ‘Bessie’, created and donated by the artist Grizel Niven. Both are anonymously endowed.
Below are the six longlisted books.
Black Butterflies by Priscilla Morris
Sarajevo, spring 1992. Each night, nationalist gangs erect barricades, splitting the diverse city into ethnic enclaves. When violence finally spills over, Zora, an artist and a teacher, sees that she must send her family to safety in England. Reluctant to leave her work, she stays behind as the city falls under siege. Everything Zora loves is laid to waste as she is forced to rebuild her life, over and over.
Inspired by real-life accounts of the longest siege in modern warfare, exactly thirty years ago, Black Butterflies is a heartrending and utterly captivating portrait of disintegration, resilience and hope.
Black Butterflies is currently available for preorder.
Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver
Demon Copperhead: a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father’s good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival. Demon befriends us on this, his journey through the modern perils of foster care, child labor, derelict schools, athletic success, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses. Through all of it, he reckons with his own invisibility in a popular culture where even the superheroes have abandoned rural people in favor of cities.
Inspired by the unflinching truth-telling of David Copperfield, Kingsolver enlists Dickens’ anger and compassion, and above all, his faith in the transformative powers of a good story. Demon Copperhead gives voice to a new generation of lost boys, and all those born into beautiful, cursed places they can’t imagine leaving behind.
The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell
Set during the Italian Renaissance and based on true events, The Marriage Portrait tells the story of Lucrezia De Medici's doomed marriage to Alfonso d'Este, the Duke of Ferrara. Given in marriage to the man her dead sister was expected to wed, headstrong Lucre chafes under the repressive rule of her mercurial new husband. With her survival and safety entirely reliant upon her ability to secure the Duke's reign by providing him with an heir, the sixteen-year-old Lucre tries to make a place for herself in a hostile court. But time is ticking, and the duke is becoming impatient ...
Gorgeously rendered, and complusively paced, this evocative work of historical fiction transports readers to the dangerous and volatile world of 16th century Europe, introducing them to a protagonist so vivid she seems to be standing over your shoulder.
Pod by Laline Paull
Ea has always felt like an outsider. As a spinner dolphin who has recently come of age, she’s now expected to join in the elaborate rituals that unite her pod. But Ea suffers from a type of deafness that means she just can’t seem to master spinning. When catastrophe befalls her family and Ea knows she is partly to blame, she decides to make the ultimate sacrifice and leave the pod.
As Ea ventures into the vast, she discovers dangers everywhere, from lurking predators to strange objects floating in the water. Not to mention the ocean itself seems to be changing: creatures are mutating, demonic noises pierce the depths, whole species of fish disappear into the sky above. Just as she is coming to terms with her solitude, a chance encounter with a group of arrogant bottlenoses will irrevocably alter the course of her life.
Fire Rush by Jacqueline Crooks
Yamaye lives for the weekend, when she can go raving with her friends at The Crypt, an underground club in the industrial town on the outskirts of London where she was born and raised. A young woman unsure of her future, the sound is her guide – a chance to discover who she really is in the rhythms of those smoke-filled nights. In the dance-hall darkness, dub is the music of her soul, her friendships, her ancestry. But everything changes when she meets Moose, the man she falls deeply in love with, and who offers her the chance of freedom and escape.
When their relationship is brutally cut short, Yamaye goes on a dramatic journey of transformation that takes her first to Bristol – where she is caught up in a criminal gang and the police riots sweeping the country – and then to Jamaica, where past and present collide with explosive consequences.
Trespasses by Louise Kennedy
There is nothing special about the day Cushla meets Michael, a married man from Belfast, in the pub owned by her family. But here, love is never far from violence, and this encounter will change both of their lives forever.
As people get up each morning and go to work, school, church or the pub, the daily news rolls in of another car bomb exploded, another man beaten, killed or left for dead. In the class Cushla teaches, the vocabulary of seven-year-old children now includes phrases like ‘petrol bomb’ and ‘rubber bullets’. And as she is forced to tread lines she never thought she would cross, tensions in the town are escalating, threatening to destroy all she is working to hold together.