Women’s Prize for Fiction Names 2019 Shortlist
The Women’s Prize for Fiction announced its 2019 shortlist.
Formerly the Orange Prize and Baileys Prize, the Women’s Prize for Fiction recognizes the best English-language novel by a woman published in the U.K. in the previous year. The award celebrates “excellence, originality and accessibility in women’s writing from throughout the world.”
The shortlist includes one debut author (Oyinkan Braithwaite), one previously shortlisted author (Anna Burns), a previous Orange Prize for Fiction winner (Madeline Miller), and an Orange Award for New Writers winner (Diana Evans). The list also includes a few Year in Reading alums, and all the books were featured in our 2018 First-Half and Second-Half Book Previews.
Here is the 2019 shortlist, with Publishers Weekly reviews:The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker
Read ’s review here: Barker, author of the Booker-winning , speculates about the fate of the women taken captive during the Trojan War, as related in Homer’s . Briseis, queen of the small country of, another recent revising of Greek mythology. The use of British contemporary slang in the dialogue is jarring, and detracts from the story’s intensity. Yet this remains a suspenseful and moving illumination of women’s fates in wartime.
