Women's prize for fiction shortlist favours new voices over big hitters

From Arundhati Roy to Jennifer Egan, some of the biggest names in literature have fallen by the wayside in the race for this year’s Women’s prize for fiction. Instead the judges have plumped for titles they felt “spoke most directly and truthfully” to them.

Three fiction debuts made the six-strong lineup for the £30,000 award: British authors Imogen Hermes Gowar, chosen for her historical novel The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock, which imagines the capture of a mermaid in Georgian London, and Jessie Greengrass for Sight, about the journey to motherhood; and American Elif Batuman for The Idiot, set at Harvard university during the 1990s.

“You can feel the full force of these new female voices … These aren’t the grand old names,” said chair of judges Sarah Sands, editor of BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. In what will be viewed as controversial, she added: “Maybe there was a kind of verve and freshness because people weren’t on the awards circuit – they’d just come and written a book because they had something to say. It wasn’t that there was an expectation.”

The best-known name in the running for this year’s award is British-Pakistani author Kamila Shamsie, chosen for her modern-day reimagining of Sophocles’ Antigone, Home Fire. Overlooked big hitters were Nicola Barker’s Goldsmiths-winning H(a)ppy, Gail Honeyman’s Costa-winning Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine and Fiona Mozley’s Booker-shortlisted Elmet.

“We lost some big names, with regret, but narrowed down the list to the books which spoke most directly and truthfully to the judges,” said Sands. “The shortlist was chosen without fear or favour … Some of the authors are young, half by Brits and all are blazingly good and brave writers.”

The lineup is completed by Jesmyn Ward’s portrait of a mixed-race family in rural Mississippi, Sing, Unburied, Sing, which won the American novelist the National Book award, and Indian author Meena Kandasamy’s second novel, an account of an abusive marriage, When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife.

Sands said the judging panelists were “all rather aghast at seeing some of those great names go, but in the end the group decision was to go with what felt most truthful”.

Discussing Greengrass’s Sight, for example, “about grief and birth, great themes, but done in this simple lucid elegant book”, one of the judges “just started crying and saying ‘this is what grief feels like’. That is how direct it was,” said Sands, who was joined on the panel by Anita Anand, Katy Brand, Catherine Mayer and Imogen Stubbs. “I’ve never been in a room where one of the judges is in tears discussing a book. Make no mistake, it was a huge act of self sacrifice to see these books being carried off, but we had to go, in the end, with our instincts,” she added.

Three of the six writers shortlisted for the prize, which is awarded for “excellence, originality and accessibility in writing by women in English from throughout the world”, are British: Hermes Gowar, Greengrass and Shamsie. Their inclusion should prove some comfort to the British literary establishment, which has been up in arms in recent months over the Man Booker’s decision in 2014 to include US writers. It was claimed the change would lead to a “homogenised literary future”.

The winner of this year’s Women’s prize for fiction will be announced on 6 June, joining a roster of former winners including Lionel Shriver, Andrea Levy and Zadie Smith.