Authors’ Club reveals Best First Novel Award 2022 shortlist

The Authors’ Club has revealed its Best First Novel Award shortlist of 2022, which includes Yvonne Bailey-Smith and Lucy Jago. 

Now in its 68th year, the £2,500 prize is the longest-running UK award for debut fiction. The 2022 prize was open to any debut novel written in English and published in the UK between 1st January and 31st December  2021. The judging panel was made up of Authors’ Club members and chaired by Lucy Popescu.

Bailey-Smith’s The Day I Fell off My Island (Myriad Editions) was praised by the judges as a “lyrical and beautifully crafted” evocation of growing up in poverty in Jamaica. 

A K Blakemore’s The Manningtree Witches (Granta) was chosen for its “glorious use of language and spellbinding imagery”, while Tish Delaney’s Before My Actual Heart Breaks (Hutchinson Heinemann) made the list for its “stunning evocation of a woman emotionally stunted by an abusive childhood and her affecting rites of passage”.

Jago’s “richly realised” A Net for Small Fishes (Bloomsbury) is also in the running, as is Catherine Menon’s “poignant” Fragile Monsters (Viking) and Melody Razak’s “beautifully written” Moth (Weidenfeld & Nicolson).

Popescu said: “These terrific debuts cover an array of subjects, from war and migration, betrayal and persecution and the importance of family ties, belonging and hope. By exploring the past, they remind us of the various ways historical narratives help us navigate the world today. We are transported from the misogyny of 17th-century England to the brutal conflict of 1970s Northern Ireland and visit 20th-century Malaysia, India and Jamaica.”

The winner will be chosen by this year’s guest adjudicator author Alex Wheatle (Liccle Bit, Atom) and announced at a dinner at the National Liberal Club on 25th May 2022.