Grant, Shapiro and Jacobson make Wingate Prize longlist

Linda Grant, Dani Shapiro and Howard Jacobson are among the 12 writers longlisted for the 2020 Wingate Prize.

The annual award, worth £4,000, is presented to the best fiction or non-fiction book to translate the idea of Jewishness to the general reader.

Grant gets a nod for A Stranger City (Virago), Shapiro for Inheritance (Daunt) and Jacobson is nominated with Live a Little (Jonathan Cape). Two Maclehose Press titles also make the list - Katalin Street by Magda Szabo and The Photographer at Sixteen by George Szirtes.

There are also nominations for Where to Find Me by Alba Arikha (Alma), Kafka's Last Trial: The Case of a Literacy Legacy by Benjamin Balint (Picador), Kaddish.com by Nathan Englander (Orion), Liar by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen (Pushkin), Survival of the Jews in France, 1940-1944 by Jacques Semelin (Hurst & Co), Lake Success by Gary Shteyngart (Hamish Hamilton) and The Order of the Day by Eric Vuillard (Picador)

This year’s judging panel is made up of novelist and lecturer Dr Roopa Farooki, writer and broadcaster Clive Lawton OBE, past Wingate Prize winner Philippe Sands and award-winning author Kim Sherwood. 

Lawton said: “These 12 books won our collective support. In every case, we confidently recommend them to the public’s attention and hope they will read them with us, as we do again, faced with the still more challenging task of narrowing them down to our shortlist in a few weeks’ time.”

The Wingate Prize shortlist will be announced in early February, with the winner crowned on 16th March. The prize is run by the Harold Hyam Wingate Charitable Foundation in partnership with JW3, the Jewish Community Centre.