The shortlists for this year’s Rathbones Folio prize spans three continents and includes Booker prize-shortlisted Glory by NoViolet Bulawayo and Pulitzer prize-winning writer Margo Jefferson’s memoir Constructing a Nervous System.
This is the first year in which the new format for the Rathbones Folio prize is running; a winner will be named in each of the three categories (fiction, nonfiction and poetry), with those winners then going on to compete for the overall prize. Category winners will receive £2,000 each, with the overall winner getting an additional £30,000. Since 2017 the prize has been open to nonfiction and poetry as well as fiction, but the introduction of category winners is new.
Alongside Bulawayo’s Glory, a political satire which takes inspiration from George Orwell’s 1984 to comment on Zimbabwean politics, the fiction shortlist also contains Sheila Heti’s Pure Colour, Daisy Hildyard’s Emergency, Michelle de Kretser’s Scary Monsters and Elizabeth Strout’s Lucy by the Sea.
In the nonfiction category Will Ashon’s The Passengers, Amy Bloom’s In Love, Jonathan Freedland’s The Escape Artist and Darren McGarvey’s The Social Distance Between Us join Jefferson on the shortlist.
The poetry category consists of Victoria Adukwei Bulley’s Quiet, Fiona Benson’s Ephemeron, Zaffar Kunial’s England’s Green and Yomi Sode’s Manorism, all of which made the TS Eliot prize longlist. The shortlist is completed by Safiya Kamaria Kinshasa’s Cane, Corn & Gully.
Pure Colour is a study of grief, in which the protagonist spends part of the novel in a leaf. Reviewing the book in the Guardian, Anne Enright said it was “an original, a book that says something new for our difficult times”, adding: “It’s a bit mad, but I think you will like it.”
Chair of judges Ali Smith described the Rathbones Folio as a prize “unlike any other in that the books in the running are specifically chosen from a long list nominated solely by writers.”
She and her fellow judges, Jackie Kay and Guy Gunaratne, are “hoping our shortlists will excite other readers and writers as much as they’ve excited us”.
Hildyard’s Emergency is a coming-of-age story set in a village in northern England, and was described by Sarah Moss in the Guardian as succeeding because “of the chilly and beautifully sustained voice of its narrator, the precise embroidery of its sentences and paragraphs, its observations of the natural world and insistence that there is no distinction between humans and environments”.
De Kretser’s Scary Monsters contains two first-person narratives, one set in 1981 and the other in a dystopian near-future; the order in which they are read is left to the reader.
Lucy by the Sea is the follow-up to Strout’s 2022 Booker prize-shortlisted Oh William!, and is set during the pandemic. Alexandra Harris in the Guardian said Strout had “written another wondrously living book, as fine a pandemic novel as one could hope for”.
Ashon’s The Passengers is a collection of stories told to him by 100 people across the UK he spoke to over the course of 18 months. Sukhdev Sandhu described it as “not just an oral history of the contemporary moment but, drenched in mood and texture, renders the country itself as a sonic collage” in the Guardian.
In Love is Bloom’s memoir of her husband, Brian Ameche’s, decision to seek assisted suicide after a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s.
Freedland’s The Escape Artist tells the story of Rudolf Vrba, who managed to escape from Auschwitz in 1944, alongside fellow prisoner Alfred Wetzler. The book was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize and Waterstones Book of the Year.
Adukwei Bulley is an alumna of the Barbican Young Poets and recipient of an Eric Gregory award, and Quiet is her debut collection.
Benson’s Ephemeron is divided into four sections, and was described by Fiona Sampson in the Guardian as showing the poet’s“unusual range”.
Kunial’s England’s Green is his second collection, and is a look at England through language and place.
Manorism is Sode’s debut collection, and its title is a word invented by Sode; he told the Guardian that the “argument I’m making is that there’s an innate manorism that comes from where you grew up – your manor – and goes with you wherever you travel”.
Safiya Kamaria Kinshasa’s Cane, Corn & Gully is published by small publisher Out-Spoken Press, founded by poet Anthony Anaxagorou. The collection, said the press, is a “genealogical and autobiographical collection which unites dance and poetry to observe, question and ruminate on what it means to adopt, perform, and pass down the notion of black West Indian femininity”.
The winners of the category prizes and the overall prize will be announced on 27 March.
Previous Folio prize winners include Colm Tóibín, Carmen Maria Machado, Raymond Antrobus, Hisham Matar and George Saunders.
