Bulawayo, Freedland and Sode make expanded Rathbones Folio Prize shortlists

NoViolet Bulawayo, Jonathan Freedland and Yomi Sode are among the writers featured in this year’s expanded Rathbones Folio Prize shortlists. 

This year’s awards have been broken down for the first time into three distinct strands—fiction, non-fiction and poetry—partly to fill the void created by the closure of the Costa Book Awards last year. Each category winner will receive £2,000 and will be in with a chance of winning the overall prize of £30,000. 

Independent publishers dominate this year’s shortlist, with three books from Faber and two from Granta. Chatto & Windus, Harvill Secker, Fitzcarraldo, Allen & Unwin, Viking, John Murray, Ebury, Jonathan Cape and Out-Spoken Press each have one book across the three categories. 

The Rathbones Folio Prize, known as the “writers’ prize”, is unique in being judged by writers. The Folio Academy of more than 300 writers collectively chooses a longlist, while this year’s shortlists were selected by three judges—novelist Ali Smith, poet Jackie Kay and author Guy Gunaratne. 

On the all-female fiction shortlist, Booker Prize-nominated Bulawayo appears for her novel Glory (Chatto & Windus), which explores the fall of Robert Mugabe through anthropomorphised animals. She is joined by Sheila Heti for her novel Pure Colour (Harvill Secker), in which the protagonist Mira traverses death, art and the nature of existence after the central character, Mira, loses her farther. 

Somerset Maugham Award-winner Daisy Hildyard appears on the fiction shortlist for Emergency (Fitzcarraldo), in which a woman stuck at home during lockdown reflects on her childhood. Michelle de Kretser is on the list with her seventh novel, Scary Monsters (Allen & Unwin), which includes two stories and allows readers to choose which one they start with. Elizabeth’s Strout’s Lucy by the Sea (Viking) is another Covid-19 novel, recalling the early days of the pandemic from protagonist Lucy Barton’s perspective. 

On the non-fiction shortlist, Will Ashon’s The Passengers (Faber) brings together a varied selection of interviews with strangers to paint a portrait of modern Britain while Amy Bloom’s In Love (Granta) document’s her late husband’s decision to seek assisted suicide. Freedland’s The Escape Artist (John Murray), also shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize, tells the story of the first inmate to escape Auschwitz. Completing the non-fiction list are Margo Jefferson with Constructing a Nervous System (Granta), a companion to her 2015 title Negroland, and Darren McGarvey with The Social Distance Between Us (Ebury), which looks at how “remote politics” has an impact on the most disadvantaged. 

The poetry shortlist features Victoria Adukwei Bulley for her collection Quiet (Faber), Fiona Benson for Ephemeron (Jonathan Cape), Safiya Kamaria Kinshasa for Cane, Corn & Gully (Out-Spoken Press), Zaffar Kunial for England’s Green (Faber) and Sode for Manorism (Penguin Poetry). 

Smith, chair of the judges panel, said: “It’s been a real pleasure, the process of choosing the cross-genre shortlists with Jackie and Guy. It’s a prize unlike any other in that the books in the running are specifically chosen from a longlist nominated solely by writers. We’ve delighted in our reading and our meetings with each other over the past months and we’re hoping our shortlists will excite other readers and writers as much as they’ve excited us.”

The winner for 2022 was Colm Tóibín, for his novel The Magician (Viking). The 2023 winner of the Rathbones Folio Prize will be announced in a ceremony at the British Library on 27th March.