It’s a Happy International Women’s Day 2012 with the announcement of the The Orange Prize for Fiction 2012 longlist. The Orange Prize for Fiction is the UK’s only annual book award for fiction written by a woman. Now in its seventeenth year, the Prize celebrates excellence, originality and accessibility in women’s writing throughout the world.
Joanna Trollope commented: “I am very proud of this year’s Orange longlist. It not only demonstrates the judges’ eye for quality, but is also evidence of the breadth of subject matter, and individuality of voice, in women’s writing todayW e were looking for excellence, accessibility and originality, and we found all three, over and over.”
* Island of Wings by Karin Altenberg (Quercus)
* On the Floor by Aifric Campbell (Serpent’s Tail)
* The Grief of Others by Leah Hager Cohen (The Clerkenwell Press)
* The Sealed Letter by Emma Donoghue (Picador)
* Half Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan (Serpent’s Tail)
* The Forgotten Waltz by Anne Enright (Jonathan Cape)
* The Flying Man by Roopa Farooki (Headline Review)
* Lord of Misrule by Jaimy Gordon (Quercus)
* Painter of Silence by Georgina Harding (Bloomsbury)
* Gillespie and I by Jane Harris (Faber & Faber)
* The Translation of the Bones by Francesca Kay (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
* The Blue Book by A.L. Kennedy (Jonathan Cape)
* The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern (Harvill Secker)
* The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller (Bloomsbury)
* Foreign Bodies by Cynthia Ozick (Atlantic Books)
* State of Wonder by Ann Patchett (Bloomsbury)
* There but for the by Ali Smith (Hamish Hamilton)
* The Pink Hotel by Anna Stothard (Alma Books)
* Tides of War by Stella Tillyard (Chatto & Windus)
* The Submission by Amy Waldman (William Heinemann)
A bit more information
The judges for the 2012 Orange Prize for Fiction are:
* Joanna Trollope, (Chair), Writer
* Lisa Appignanesi, Writer, Novelist and Broadcaster
* Victoria Derbyshire, Journalist and Broadcaster
* Natalie Haynes, Writer and Broadcaster
* Natasha Kaplinsky, Broadcaster
The shortlist will be announced on 17 April and the winner on 30 May.
Get involved
Lots of reading groups and book clubs get involved in shadowing the Prize each year, so if you are thinking about shadowing this year’s Prize read about how Grange Library Reading Group went about it.
You may interested in how reading groups came together last year in Warwickshire to create a ‘super’ group to shadow the Prize
Watch out for the Orange Prize for Fiction displays and events taking place in libraries.
Get in touch if you would like to tell us about how your reading group is going to be involved with the Orange Prize for Fiction.
