The Baileys Prize Shortlist – who the authors are and where they’ve come from…

The Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction shortlist of six – announced this week –  come from three continents, four countries and five publishers. Here they are (and Granta must be feeling pretty pleased with itself):

• Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ from Nigeria: Stay With Me (Canongate, a debut novel);

• Naomi Alderman, from the UK: The Power (Viking, her fourth novel—she won the Orange Prize for New Writers in 2006);

• Linda Grant, from the UK: The Dark Circle (Virago, her sixth novel —she won the prize in 2000 and was longlisted in 2008);

• C.E. Morgan, from the United States: The Sport of Kings (4th Estate, her second novel);

• Gwendoline Riley, from the UK: First Love (Granta, her sixth novel);

• Madeleine Thein, from Canada: Do Not Say We Have Nothing (Granta, her third novel).

The winner will be announced on June 7 at The Royal Festival Hall, and receive £30,000, but all the writers on the shortlist should see increased sales and win new readers.

I’m rooting for Linda Grant simply because I love everything I’ve read by her from her family memoir, Remind Me Who I am Again to When I Lived in Modern Times, a novel about Israel in the 1940s. I’m reading Still Here at the moment and immersed in Liverpool, a city in transition.

The Baileys Prize is open to any woman writing anywhere in English. It was created in 1996 “to champion writing by women, and celebrate the incredible pleasure of reading a great book”.

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