The Women’s Prize for Fiction – the greatest celebration of women’s creativity – today announces its 2022 Shortlist. Now in its 27th year, the Prize honours outstanding, ambitious, original fiction written in English by women from anywhere in the world. This year’s shortlist incorporates a range of themes including belonging and identity; the power of nature; the burden of history; personal freedom; sisterhood; mental illness; ghosts; gender violence; and the opportunity for renewal. The novels also offer globe-spanning settings, from Antarctica to Montana, Cyprus to Trinidad.

This year's shortlisted titles are:

The Bread The Devil Knead by Lisa Allen-Agostini

The Sentence by Louise Erdrich

Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason

The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki

The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak

Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead

This year’s shortlist has been selected by the Chair of Judges Mary Ann Sieghart and her judging panel: Lorraine Candy, award-winning journalist and editor; Dorothy Koomson, global bestselling novelist, journalist and podcaster; Anita Sethi, award-winning author and literary journalist; and Pandora Sykes, journalist, broadcaster and author. 

Chair of Judges and bestselling writer Mary Ann Sieghart says: “We were blessed with an extraordinarily high quality of submissions this year, which made whittling down the longlist from 16 to six particularly difficult. 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. 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 winner of the 2022 Women’s Prize for Fiction will be awarded on Wednesday 15 June 2022 at an evening awards ceremony in central London. She will receive an anonymously endowed cheque for £30,000 and a limited-edition bronze figurine known as a ‘Bessie’, created and donated by the artist Grizel Niven. More information can be found here: www.womensprizeforfiction.co.uk 

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The Women’s Prize will be hosting a Virtual Shortlist Festival on Monday 23, Tuesday 24 and Wednesday 25 June, 7pm, featuring Live Q&As with the shortlisted authors. These events will be hosted by Kate Mosse, Founder Director of the Prize, and will present readings from well-known actors. Tickets can be bought via Eventbrite. 

We are running a competition to win this year's shortlist, which you can enter here. What a stunning book tower! Good luck.

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