This year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction shortlist is one of the most surprising in years. I say surprising because in a literary prize landscape that can sometimes feel like a carousel of the already-much-lauded, this year’s judges, chaired by former Australian prime minister Julia Gillard, have chosen a list that feels genuinely exploratory.
Four of the six are not only debuts, but are published by independent presses, meaning that alongside the two by established voices (Susan Choi and Lily King), this is a shortlist that gives space to under-championed books many readers will not yet have come across.
It is also a shortlist full of late bloomers and sleeper hits. Marcia Hutchinson came to writing later in life and was rejected more than 50 times before finding a publisher for her 60s-set coming-of-age novel The Mercy Step, while Rozie Kelly was turned down 40 times before the indie publisher Saraband picked up Kingfisher.
Virginia Evans wrote seven abandoned novels before her debut, The Correspondent, which was published to little fanfare last year – before eventually becoming a word-of-mouth phenomenon. Even Lily King, though a successful and much-loved novelist in the US, seems to have had something of a UK breakthrough with Heart the Lover.
