Kingsolver and O’Farrell shortlisted for 2023 Women’s Prize for Fiction

Barbara Kingsolver and Maggie O’Farrell have been shortlisted for the 2023 Women’s Prize for Fiction, alongside Jacqueline Crooks, Louise Kennedy, Priscilla Morris and Laline Paull.

Both Kingsolver and O’Farrell have won the prize before, with Kingsolver’s The Lacuna (Faber & Faber) taking home the prize in 2010 and O’Farrell’s Hamnet in 2020. This year they are shortlisted for Demon Copperhead (Faber & Faber), Kingsolver’s riff on Dickens’ David Copperfield, and The Marriage Portrait (Tinder Press), O’Farrell’s story of Lucrezia de Medici.

Three debut authors join the “ambitious, eclectic and hard-hitting” shortlist in Kennedy, Crooks and Morris. Kennedy’s Trespasses (Bloomsbury), set in 1970s Belfast, is in contention, alongside Crooks’ Fire Rush (Jonathan Cape), which travels between London, Bristol and Jamaica, and Morris’ Black Butterflies (Duckworth Books), a tale of life during the 1992 siege of Sarajevo. Three debuts constitutes the joint-highest number ever shortlisted, matched in 2014 and 2018. Laline Paull’s third novel, Pod (Corsair), a story of dolphins and the ocean, completes the shortlist. Paull was previously shortlisted for The Bees in 2015 (Fourth Estate).

Describing the shortlist as a "glittering showcase of the power of women’s writing", the chair of judges, broadcaster and writer Louise Minchin, told The Bookseller: "I am so excited and inspired by the books on the shortlist. They are exquisitely written, emotionally powerful and imaginatively ambitious. Together they are a wonderful example of the strength and creativity of women’s writing. I have loved reading them and can’t wait for them to be in the hands of more readers."

Minchin is joined on the judging panel by novelist Rachel Joyce; journalist, podcaster and writer Bella Mackie; novelist and short story writer Irenosen Okojie; and MP Tulip Siddiq.

Now in its 28th year, the Women’s Prize for Fiction is awarded for the best full-length novel of the year written by a woman and published in the UK between 1st April 2022 and 31st March 2023. Any woman writing in English – whatever her nationality, country of residence, age or subject matter – is eligible. The 2023 Women’s Prize for Fiction will be awarded on Wednesday 14th June 2023 at the Women’s Prize Trust’s Summer Party in central London.

The winner will receive an anonymously endowed cheque for £30,000 and a limited-edition bronze figurine known as a "Bessie", created and donated by the artist Grizel Niven.