Women and Americans lead shortlist in Folio’s bid to rival the Booker

 
10 February 2014
The Weekender

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Women outgun men and North Americans trump all in the shortlist of the inaugural Folio Prize which was set up in exasperation at its rival, the Man Booker.

The £40,000 award also favours experience over youth, with only one author under 40 — Eimear McBride — on the eight-strong list chosen by a highbrow panel of writers and critics and chaired by poet and novelist Lavinia Greenlaw.

Irish-British McBride, 37, makes the grade with her debut novel, A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, which was originally rejected by publishers for being too experimental.

Her story of an abused young girl who goes off the rails is one of two British titles on the list, alongside Last Friends, the last in 85-year-old Jane Gardam’s trilogy about the bittersweet experiences of Empire and old age.

Talks about setting up the Folio Prize began after Stella Rimington, the former spy chief who chaired the 2011 Booker panel, stressed the importance of “readability” in an award traditionally regarded as literary.

The new prize wants to find “the best English-language fiction from around the world”, including the Americans hitherto excluded from the Booker, which has expanded its eligibility criteria for 2014 from Commonwealth writers to anyone writing in English.

With the first shortlist having five Americans (one of Colombian descent) and a Canadian, fears about prospects for British writers in both awards will be reignited. The Colombian-American is Sergio De La Pava, 43, a New York lawyer, with his first novel, A Naked Singularity, which he first published himself.

The other contenders are Tenth of December, short stories by George Saunders, 55; The Flamethrowers, about a woman in the Seventies New York art scene, by Rachel Kushner, 45; Schroder, about a father who kidnaps his six-year-old daughter, by Amity Gaige, 41; and Benediction, about a family in Colorado, by Kent Haruf, 70. The Canadian entry is Red Doc, a verse-novel by classics professor Anne Carson, 63.

Lavinia Greenlaw said 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”.

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