The Women’s Prize for Fiction 2022 shortlist has finally been announced and the judges are facing a difficult decision in the weeks to come as they attempt to whittle down these magnificent reads to a single winner.
Anyone who’s already avidly working their way through the best best books of 2022 and has treasured copies of the 28 books everyone should read at least once will likely have been on tenterhooks the past few months. Following the announcement of the Women’s Prize for Fiction longlist for this year, the judges have been deliberating which six titles would be left in the running to succeed the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2021 winner as the latest victor.
Now the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2022 shortlist has been unveiled and they’re sure to be considered some of the best books of all time. This year’s Chair of Judges was Mary Ann Sieghart, author of The Authority Gap and she was joined by award-winning journalist and editor Lorraine Candy, bestselling novelist Dorothy Koomson, author and literary journalist Anita Sethi, and broadcaster Pandora Sykes.
“We were blessed with an extraordinarily high quality of submissions this year, which made whittling down the longlist from 16 to six particularly difficult,” Mary Ann explained. “But the shortlist contains a wonderfully diverse range of stories, subjects, settings, and authors, from the experience of a Native American woman in a haunted bookshop to an early female aviator in the Antarctic. One novel is narrated by a tree; another by a book. Some are laugh-out-loud funny, others tearful, and sometimes the two are combined in the same book."
She continued, “We judges have loved reading them all and we commend them to you as the best fiction written by women and published in the past year. Our only problem now will be to identify the winner out of these six brilliant novels.”
The Women’s Prize for Fiction 2022 shortlist
1. The Bread the Devil Knead by Lisa Allen-Agostini
2. The Sentence by Louise Erdrich
3. Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason
4. The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki
5. The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak
6. Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead
We are THRILLED to announce the 2022 #WomensPrize shortlist 🎉Huge congratulations to our shortlisted authors!Discover these six spectacular books now: https://t.co/nR4rwru9Rj pic.twitter.com/xSELWhPBheApril 27, 2022
The Women’s Prize for Fiction was set up in 1996 to pay tribute to and promote fiction by women. It’s awarded to the best full-length novel written by any woman and the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2022 books were published between April 1, 2021 and March 31, 2022.
This year’s winner will be awarded on June 15 and the writer will receive a £30,000 cheque and a limited-edition bronze figurine, a Bessie, created and donated by Grizel Niven.
