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Garmus, Ahmad and Kennedy up for SoA Awards
Debut author Aamina Ahmad has been nominated across two categories in this year’s Society of Authors (SoA) awards, while the inaugural shortlist for the Authors with Disabilities & Chronic Illnesses Literary Prize (ADCI Literary Prize) has been revealed.
Three books are nominated for the first-ever ADCI Literary Prize, worth £2,000, which was launched by author Penny Batchelor and her publisher RedDoor Press last June to celebrate positive disability representation in fiction. Batchelor praised the range of entries: “It was a delight to see so many different novel genres represented in the prize’s submissions and, with fantasy and myth, speculative and uplit, the shortlist reflects this. There’s something for all fiction lovers."
Thirty-six writers, poets and illustrators are nominated altogether across the 11 categories which also includes the ALCS Tom-Gallon Trust Award, the Betty Trask Prize, the Paul Torday Memorial Prize, the Queen’s Knickers Award, the McKitterick Prize and the Gordon Bowker Volcano Prize.
Bloomsbury features three times across the shortlisted titles while Pan Macmillan, Sceptre and Vintage also received several nods. Ahmad’s Writers’ Guild Award-winning novel The Return of Faraz Ali (Sceptre) is the only author to be shortlisted across two categories while debut authors Louisa Kennedy and Bonnie Garmus (pictured), have also been recognised a week after their triumphs at the British Book Awards.
Fellow first-time novelist Richard Reverend Coles is in the running for his ecclesiastical Whodunnit Murder Before Evensong (Weidenfeld & Nicholson) while the Desmond Elliott Prize-winning novelist Maddie Mortimer is among those vying for the biggest cash windfall of the evening, the Betty Trask Prize, worth £26,200.
The winners are to be announced on 29th June at Southwark Cathedral, London, sharing a prize fund of over £100,000. The awards ceremony will be presented by Joanne Harris with Val McDermid as keynote speaker.
Winners of the Travelling Scholarships, Cholmondeley Awards, Eric Gregory Awards and Somerset Maugham Awards will also be announced on the night.
The full shortlist as follows:
The ADCI Literary Prize
- Nicola Griffith for Spear (Tordotcom Publishing)
- Deborah Jenkins for Braver (Fairlight Books)
- Fiona Scott-Barrett for The Exit Facility (self-published)
The ALCS Tom-Gallon Trust Award
- Joe Bedford for "The Christening"
- Ciarán Folan for "A Day"
- Kerry Hood for "The Sunbathers"
- Niamh Mac Cabe for "Sky an Iris"
- Lishani Ramanayake for "Amba Yahulowo"
- Karen Stevens for "Among the Crows"
The Betty Trask Prize
- Paddy Crewe for My Name is Yip (Doubleday)
- Imogen Crimp for A Very Nice Girl (Bloomsbury Publishing)
- Maddie Mortimer for Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies (Picador)
- Daniel Wiles for Mercia’s Take (Swift Press)
Gordon Bowker Volcano Prize
- Aamina Ahmad for The Return of Faraz Ali (Sceptre)
- Julia Armfield for Our Wives Under the Sea (Picador)
- Vesna Goldsworthy for Iron Curtain: A Love Story (Chatto & Windus)
- Alex Hyde for Violets (Granta Books)
- Anjali Joseph for Keeping in Touch (Scribe UK)
- David Park for Spies in Canaan (Bloomsbury Publishing)
McKitterick Prize
- Aamina Ahmad for The Return of Faraz Ali (Sceptre)
- Liz Hyder for The Gifts (Manilla Press)
- Louise Kennedy for Trespasses (Bloomsbury Publishing)
- Ayanna Lloyd Banwo for When We Were Birds (Hamish Hamilton)
- Joanna Quinn for The Whalebone Theatre (Fig Tree)
- Taymour Soomro for Other Names for Love (Harvill Secker)
Paul Torday Memorial Prize
- Tony Curtis for Darkness in the City of Light (Seren Books)
- Jonathan Franklin for Red Road Green (Sparsile Books Ltd)
- Bonnie Garmus for Lessons in Chemistry (Doubleday)
- Julie Owen Moylan for That Green Eyed Girl (Michael Joseph)
- Reverend Richard Coles for Murder Before Evensong (Weidenfeld & Nicholson)
Queen’s Knickers Award
- John Agard and illustrator Satoshi Kitamura for When Creature Met Creature (Scallywag Press)
- Beach for The Knight with the Blazing Bottom (Simon & Schuster Children’s UK)
- Olaf Falafel for Blobfish (Walker Books Ltd)
- Chris Naylor-Ballesteros for Frank and Bert (Nosy Crow Ltd)
- Caspar Salmon and illustrator Matt Hunt for How to Count to One (Nosy Crow)
