The shortlist for the 2009 Orange Prize for Fiction was announced earlier today. The six...
The shortlist for the 2009 Orange Prize for Fiction was announced earlier today. The six shortlisted novels are:
Scottsboro by Ellen Feldman (Picador)
The Wilderness by Samantha Harvey (Cape)
The Invention of Everything Else by Samantha Hunt (Harvill Secker)
Molly Fox’s Birthday by Deidre Madden (Faber)
Home by Marilynne Robinson (Virago)
Burnt Shadows by Kamila Shamsie (Bloomsbury)
Listen to Granta editor Alex Clark discuss the shortlist on BBC Radio 4’s
.
‘We meet at various points in the great swathes of the past that neither of us were alive to witness.’
Allen Bratton on a daytrip to a castle with his older boyfriend.
‘Listening to three white poets, whom I suspect are academics, talk about the state of poetry.’
Oluwaseun Olayiwola eavesdrops on an older generation.
‘I’d been dubious about his company at first.’
Sarah Moss on watching Shakespeare with her twelve-year-old son.
‘She didn’t trust us because, to her, tenants were like children.’
Kate Zambreno on negotiating with her older landlady.
‘A moment now swallowed in embarrassment, I asked a question only a young person might ask an older one.’
Lynne Tillman on trying to understand what makes a generation.
A journalist receives a troubling call about a friend in this excerpt from Madeleine Bunting’s new novel Ceremony of Innocence.
‘Pictures from some cities in Latin America: the burning in front of the family home of the dead who are not collected by the state.’
A coronavirus diary from the Portuguese writer Gonçalo M. Tavares, translated by Daniel Hahn.
‘My Cairo is an inverted city, one that wears its innards above the skin.’
‘You can throw yourself into any fantasy, she (and her country) might have been saying, so long as you don’t mistake it for real life.’
‘Sometimes, in the midst of one of our arguments, he would say to me sadly, I understand you more if I understand less.’
