Awards: Women's Prize Longlist; Windham Campbell Prizes

Publishers Lunch

The UK's Women's Prize -- once sponsored by Orange, now backed by Bailey's -- announced their 20-title longlist, which will get slimmed considerably to a six-title shortlist next month. At this stage it's most interesting for the small set of titles for which we could not find any known US publisher yet. They are:

The Dogs of Littlefield, Suzanne Berne
The Strangler Vine, M.J. Carter
Reasons She Goes to the Woods, Deborah Kay Davies
Almost English, Charlotte Mendelson

Among longlisted titles to be published later in the year in the US, there's Evie Wyld's April release, All The Birds, Singing, which is among the 40 titles you can preview right now in our free ebook, Publishers Lunch Buzz Books 2014: Spring/Summer.

In other awards news, the Windham Campbell Prizes were awarded Friday morning to eight recipients, including Nadeem Aslam, Jim Crace, and Aminatta Forna (fiction), and Pankaj Mishra and John Vaillant (nonfiction). Each winner will receive $150,000, with a presentation ceremony at Yale on September 15. Three drama writers -- Kia Corthron, Sam Holcroft, and Noëlle Janaczewska -- were also honored.

Crace said in a statement that the timing of the award, selected in secret with no public nominations or longlists, was perfect: "After a couple of years of creative doubt when I thought I might not write another novel but should turn instead to the theater, I have rediscovered my passion for fiction. Stories are crowding in, demanding their space on the page. The Windham Campbell Prize at Yale gives me the independence and the confidence to take on those stories, free from everyday pressures."