The Women's Prize for Fiction has unveiled a sweeping first longlist since Baileys gave the prize its new name, says Gaby Wood
The Baileys Women's Prize jury for 2014: Mary Beard, Denise Mina, Helen Fraser (Chair), Caitlin Moran and Sophie Raworth
The Telegraph - 07 Mar 2014
The first longlist of the newly named Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction has been announced, and it offers a great sweep of geography, genre and style. With a total of 20 novels included, it's almost impossible to interpret any particular shape or slant to the list, yet the broad range and high quality itself indicates that fiction written by women is thriving.
In some previous years – when the prize existed under the auspices of Orange – there was little overlap between this list and that of others such as the Man Booker or the Costa. In others, the overlap has been critical: last year Hilary Mantel was expected to receive a third nod, having won the Man Booker and the Costa, and the idea of her scooping up all the prizes became contentious.
The Baileys list for 2014 includes last year's Man Booker winner, Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries, and The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri, which was on that prize's shortlist. Charlotte Mendelson, who was longlisted for the Man Booker, is also here. Rachel Kushner's The Flamethrowers, which is on the shortlist for the inaugural Folio Prize, is included, as is Evie Wyld's All the Birds, Singing, which earned her inclusion on the Granta list of Best Young British Novelists.
Donna Tartt's majestic The Goldfinch – neglected by the Folio Prize but still eligible for the Man Booker 2014 – is on the Baileys list, as are two historical novels, by Elizabeth Gilbert (best known for her memoir Eat, Pray, Love) and MJ Carter, the fiction-writing pseudonym of Miranda Carter, historian and biographer of Anthony Blunt. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who won the Orange Prize with her second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, is here with Americanah, a book set in Lagos and post-9/11 America. Former Booker winner Margaret Atwood is included too, for MaddAddam, the final part of her sci-fi trilogy.
But the detail that most turns all existing prizes on their heads is the inclusion of Eimear McBride's novel A Girl is a Half-formed Thing. Not because it is undeserving, but because this is the third prize it has been listed for since it was published on the assumption that it would not win any prizes. The book – heroically brought out by the tiny Norwich-based publisher Galley Beggar Press after several others had turned it down – is formally groundbreaking, and has been declared a work of "genius" by Man Booker winner Anne Enright. It came to widespread public attention last year, when it was awarded the inaugural Goldsmiths Prize, set up to reward iconoclastic fiction. Since then, the book has been shortlisted for the Folio Prize and now longlisted for the Baileys: the establishment, in other words, is remaking itself in the image of the revolutionary.
The Baileys Women's Prize longlist in full:
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah (Fourth Estate)
Margaret Atwood, MaddAddam (Bloomsbury)
Suzanne Berne, The Dogs of Littlefield (Fig Tree)
Fatima Bhutto, The Shadow of the Crescent Moon (Viking)
Claire Cameron, The Bear (Harvill Secker)
Lea Carpenter, Eleven Days (Two Roads)
M.J. Carter, The Strangler Vine (Fig Tree)
Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries (Granta)
Deborah Kay Davies, Reasons She Goes to the Woods (Oneworld)
Elizabeth Gilbert, The Signature of All Things (Bloomsbury)
Hannah Kent, Burial Rites (Picador)
Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers (Harvill Secker)
Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowland (Bloomsbury)
Audrey Magee, The Undertaking (Atlantic Books)
Eimear McBride, A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing (Gallery Beggar Press)
Charlotte Mendelson, Almost English (Mantle)
Anna Quindlen, Still Life with Bread Crumbs (Hutchinson)
Elizabeth Strout, The Burgess Boys (Simon and Schuster)
Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch (Little, Brown)
Evie Wyld, All The Birds, Singing (Jonathan Cape)
