Enright favourite to win Baileys prize

It could be second time lucky for author Anne Enright as bookmakers William Hill have her as odds-on favourite to win the Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction next week.

The bookmaker has Irish author Enright to win The Baileys prize 5/2 for her sixth novel The Green Road (Vintage) about a family which returns to the west coast of Ireland for a final Christmas in the home their mother is about to sell.

The next novel most likely to win the prestigious prize, which is announced next Wednesday (8th June), is debut The Glorious Heresies by Lisa McInerney (John Murray) at 3/1, and in joint third place are Cynthia Bond’s Ruby (Two Roads) and Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life (Picador). The only British author on the shortlist - Hannah Rothschild with her novel The Improbability of Love (Bloomsbury)- is the fifth most likely to win according to William Hill, while Elizabeth McKenzie’s The Portable Veblen (Fourth Estate) is last at 15/2.                                                                                                                                          

The winner of the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction will be presented with a cheque for £30,000 and a limited edition bronze statue known as ‘the Bessie’, created by artist Grizel Niven. Both are anonymously endowed.

Set up in 1996 to celebrate and promote international fiction by women throughout the world to the widest range of readers possible, the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction is awarded for the best novel of the year written by a woman.  Any woman writing in English – whatever her nationality, country of residence, age or subject matter – is eligible