The Orange Prize for Fiction, the UK’s prestigious annual award celebrating “excellence, originality and accessibility in women’s writing throughout the world,” announced their 2012 longlist today, coinciding with International Women’s Day, and the group of books is a formidable one — we just added a huge stack of books to our to-read list. The prize has a knack for picking out some of the best work by women around: previous winners have included Zadie Smith for On Beauty (2006), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie for Half of a Yellow Sun (2007), Marilyn Robinson for Home (2009), and Téa Obreht for The Tiger’s Wife (2011), among many other greats. Head over to the Orange Prize website for author biographies and synopses of the nominated books, and let us know which you think should win in the comments.
Island of Wings by Karin Altenberg (Quercus) – Swedish; 1st Novel
On the Floor by Aifric Campbell (Serpent’s Tail) – Irish; 3rd Novel
The Grief of Others by Leah Hager Cohen (The Clerkenwell Press) – American; 4th Novel
The Sealed Letter by Emma Donoghue (Picador) – Irish; 7th Novel
Half Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan (Serpent’s Tail) – Canadian; 2nd Novel
The Forgotten Waltz by Anne Enright (Jonathan Cape) – Irish; 5th Novel
The Flying Man by Roopa Farooki (Headline Review) – British; 5th Novel
Lord of Misrule by Jaimy Gordon (Quercus) – American; 4th Novel
Painter of Silence by Georgina Harding (Bloomsbury) – British; 3rd Novel
Gillespie and I by Jane Harris (Faber & Faber) – British; 2nd Novel
The Translation of the Bones by Francesca Kay (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) – British; 2nd Novel
The Blue Book by A.L. Kennedy (Jonathan Cape) – British; 6th Novel
The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern (Harvill Secker) – American; 1st Novel
The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller (Bloomsbury) – American; 1st Novel
Foreign Bodies by Cynthia Ozick (Atlantic Books) – American; 7th Novel
State of Wonder by Ann Patchett (Bloomsbury) – American; 6th Novel
There but for the by Ali Smith (Hamish Hamilton) – British; 5th Novel
The Pink Hotel by Anna Stothard (Alma Books) – British; 2nd Novel
Tides of War by Stella Tillyard (Chatto & Windus) – British; 1st Novel
The Submission by Amy Waldman (William Heinemann) – American; 1st Novel