Goldsmiths Prize-winning novelist Eimear McBride has made the shortlist for the Folio Prize, a new £40,000 award for English-language fiction from across the globe.
McBride, whose debut novel A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing was published by Norwich-based Galley Beggar Press in February 2013 (9 years after it was rejected by almost every publisher in the UK), is one of only three non-American writers to have made the cut. The list is as follows:
Red Doc by Anne Carson (Jonathan Cape)
Schroder by Amity Gaige (Faber & Faber)
Last Friends by Jane Gardam (Little, Brown)
Benediction by Kent Haruf (Picador)
The Flame Throwers by Rachel Kushner (Harvill Secker)
A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing by Eimear McBride (Galley Beggar Press)
A Naked Singularity by Sergio De La Pava (Maclehose Editions)
Tenth of December by George Saunders (Bloomsbury)
“From its inception, the emphasis of the Folio Prize has been on the relationship between good writing and good reading,” said Lavinia Greenlaw, who chaired the panel of judges this year. “The Prize makes an unapologetic assertion about the value of experience and expertise, and the high expectations that come from spending much of your life investigating and testing language and form.”
The Folio Prize is judged by a panel of five, drawn by ballot – redrawn again and again until the panel contains no more than three members of the same gender, three from the UK and two from abroad – from a 187-strong academy of critics, writers and professors. Each member of the academy is asked to nominate three titles, of which the top sixty books are forwarded to the judging panel. The panel this year included the American novelist Michael Chabon, British short story writer Sarah Hall, Indian essayist and novelist Pankaj Mishra, Vietnamese-Australian short story writer Nam Le, and was chaired by poet Lavinia Greenlaw.
Andrew Kidd, MD at literary agency Aitken Alexander (and the Prize’s founder), said that the academy had produced “the most rigorous, careful and generous sounding any author could wish for … a list that ticks no boxes, balances the interests of no constituencies and will no doubt stir all kinds of debate.”
The Prize’s sponsor, The Folio Society, also announced the launch of a new two-day literary festival to take place on the weekend 8-9 March with a series of events structured around the fundamentals of fiction: form, voice, structure, place and context. The winner of the Folio Prize – in some respects a litmus test for the internationalist swerve of other major prizes – will be announced on 10 March during a ceremony at London’s St Pancras Renaissance Hotel.
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