The clash between Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other and Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport for last year’s Booker prize is set for a replay after both novels made the shortlist for the Orwell award for political fiction.
The £3,000 prize, intended to reward novels that “illuminate major social and political themes”, is in its second year and was won in 2019 by Anna Burns’s Booker winner Milkman. This year, Evaristo’s polyphonic novel about the lives of different generations of black women, already joint winner of last year’s Booker, will compete with five other titles including Ellmann’s 1,000-page stream-of-consciousness. Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer-winning The Nickel Boys, Edna O’Brien’s Girl. Attica Locke’s Heaven, My Home and John Lanchester’s The Wall are also in the running.
Judges, chaired by theatre director and producer Jude Kelly, called Girl, Woman, Other “worldly, compassionate and detailed” as it depicts its characters “attempting to achieve self-realisation against the forces of classic family conservatism and within a society structured to maintain white supremacy”. Ellmann’s novel is “witty, alarming and utterly absorbing”, they added, while The Nickel Boys, which follows two boys sentenced to a hellish reform school, “is unsparing in its depiction of corruption and racial brutality”.
The seven books in the running for the £3,000 prize for political writing were also unveiled on Thursday, with Guardian journalist Amelia Gentleman’s exposé of the Windrush scandal, The Windrush Betrayal, making the final lineup, described by judges as a book that “reminds us, with remarkable power, why journalism truly matters”.
The nonfiction prize, for books that “strive to meet Orwell’s own ambition ‘to make political writing into an art’”, also shortlisted titles including Kate Clanchy’s Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me, Caroline Criado Perez’s exposé of data bias and discrimination against women, Invisible Women, and Robert Macfarlane’s Underland, an exploration of the world beneath our feet that judges called a “tour de force that feels simultaneously timely and timeless”.
Organisers said that the 13 books chosen for both prizes “may have been written in a pre-Covid era, but they still resonate and speak to us about the world we might want to live in after and during this crisis”.
The winners of both prizes will be announced on 25 June, Orwell’s birthday.
The 2020 Orwell prize for political writing shortlist
Appeasing Hitler: Chamberlain, Churchill and the Road to War by Tim Bouverie (Bodley Head)
Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me by Kate Clanchy (Picador)
Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Perez (Chatto & Windus)
The Windrush Betrayal: Exposing the Hostile Environment by Amelia Gentleman (Guardian Faber)
Underland: A Deep Time Journey by Robert Macfarlane (Hamish Hamilton)
Margaret Thatcher - Herself Alone: The Authorized Biography Vol 3 by Charles Moore (Allen Lane)
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff (Profile)
The 2020 Orwell prize for political fiction shortlist
Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann (Galley Beggar Press)
Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo (Hamish Hamilton)
The Wall by John Lanchester (Faber & Faber)
Heaven, My Home by Attica Locke (Serpent’s Tail)
Girl by Edna O’Brien (Faber & Faber)
The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead (Fleet)
