Debuts dominate £10k Portico Prize shortlist

The shortlist for the Portico Prize for Literature has been revealed, featuring four debuts as well as titles from Andrew O' Hagan and Jenn Ashworth.

This year's shortlist for the UK’s only award for outstanding northern writing was announced on 7th December and includes five novels and one memoir, with exciting new voices sitting alongside established writers, each one exploring “the spirit of the north”.

Hachette and HarperCollins have two each on the list with indie presses comprising the other two. Across Hachette, Ashworth (Sceptre) is nominated for her ninth book, the unconventional love story Ghosted. Fellow contender Toto Among the Murderers by debut author Sally J Morgan (J M Originals), is a story loosely based on her own experience of being offered a lift by the murderers Fred and Rosemary West. 

Debut author Sairish Hussain has been recognised for The Family Tree (HQ), a story of a multi-generational British Muslim family living in the north of England, alongside Tabitha Lasley’s first book, Sea State (Fourth Estate), an account of time spent with the men who work on offshore North Sea oil rigs. 

Representing the indie presses, there is O'Hagan's Manchester-based ode to music, Mayflies (Faber), alongside The Outsiders, a debut by author and journalist James Corbett (Lightning Books), a story set against the backdrop of the Liverpool riots of the early 1980s. 

Gary Younge, author, broadcaster and a professor of sociology at the University of Manchester, acted as chair of the judges. The panel also featured broadcaster Melanie Sykes, poet and essayist Momtaza Mehri and Anita Singh, arts and entertainment editor at the Daily Telegraph. 

Younge said of the shortlist: “The list illustrates the degree to which there is not one north but many, rooted not just in place but time, gender, race and religion: all moulded into elegant prose and conveyed with engaging storytelling. Throughout runs a strong sense of unromantic nostalgia for a north that no longer exists and yet remains with us so long as the stories are told." 

Lynne Allan, chair of the Portico Library in Manchester, commented: “Fittingly for a prize hosted by the historic Portico Library, these six books vividly explore how the past haunts and shapes the present and the future. They range over diverse individual lives, families and communities. Each one is an entertaining and irresistible page-turner allowing the reader to enter and inhabit the minds, existence, loves and desires of the protagonists. These shortlisted writers profoundly and fearlessly reflect on their experience of the north. Here you will find engaging stories of inclusion and exclusion, of being an insider and outsider and they represent a wide scope of northern identity.” 

The winner will be announced at a ceremony on 20th January 2022. Each of the shortlisted authors will be given honorary membership of the Portico Library in 2022 and the winner will receive £10,000. 

The prize was established in 1985 by the Portico Library in Manchester to celebrate the strong regional and literary identity of the north with the aim of raising awareness of its historical, cultural and literary heritage.