Sixteen novels are in contention for the £30,000 award, now in its 31st year, with settings ranging from climate-ravaged islands to a near-future Kolkata
Katie Kitamura, Susan Choi, Kit de Waal and Lily King are among the authors longlisted for this year’s Women’s prize for fiction.
Awarded annually and now in its 31st year, the prize comes with £30,000, and is one of the most prominent accolades for women’s writing in the English language. The 16-strong list features a selection of novels that range in setting from climate-ravaged islands to a near-future Kolkata, and from 1970s Birmingham to East Berlin on the brink of reunification.
Choi was longlisted for her Booker-shortlisted novel Flashlight, a sweeping historical family saga propelled by a father’s disappearance, its trauma rippling across generations and geographies. Ranging from North Korea to Indiana, the US writer’s sixth novel is “geopolitically bold” and full of “confident chaos”, writes Beejay Silcox in her Guardian review.
US writer Kitamura’s third novel Audition, also shortlisted for the 2025 Booker prize, follows an unnamed actor who is confronted by a younger man who claims to be her son, and probes the role that acting and performance play in our lives.
