Longlist for £10k RSL Ondaatje Prize revealed

Elif Shafak, Cal Flyn, Joelle Taylor and Sathnam Sanghera are among the 20 authors longlisted for this year’s £10,000 Royal Society of Literature (RSL) Ondaatje Prize.

The annual award is presented by the RSL to an outstanding work of fiction, non-fiction or poetry that best evokes the spirit of a place.

This year’s longlist was chosen by judges Patrice Lawrence, chair Sandeep Parmar and Philippe Sands. It includes Shafak for The Island of Missing Trees (Penguin), while Flyn is picked for Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape (William Collins). Taylor’s T Eliot Prize-winning C+nto & Othered Poems (The Westbourne Press) and Sanghera’s Empireland (Viking) also make the cut.

Parmar said: “From 17th-century witch trials in England to a massacre in wartime Poland, the traumatic displacements of a Lebanese refugee camp to the deep scars of Empire on Britain, these, and the other longlisted books, take place to mean both geographical space and the imagined realities of being in the world. Every book teaches us something about how we carry the spirit of place within us across the breach of history through the perils of forgetting.”

The 2022 RSL Ondaatje Prize Shortlist will be announced on 20th April and the winner will be crowned on 4th May at Two Temple Place in London.

The longlist in full:

Hester Barron & Claire Langhamer, Class of ‘37 (John Blake)

Polly Barton, Fifty Sounds (Fifty Sounds)

A K Blakemore, The Manningtree Witches (Granta)

Kirsty Capes, Careless (Orion Fiction)

Sonia Faleiro, The Good Girls: An Ordinary Killing (Bloomsbury Circus)

Cal Flyn, Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape (William Collins)

Sabba Khan, The Roles We Play (Myriad Editions)

Jake Morris-Campbell, Corrigenda for Costafine Town (Blue Diode Press)

Rebecca Netley, The Whistling (Michael Joseph)

Yousif M Qasmiyeh, Writing the Camp (Broken Sleep Books)

Jane Rogoyska, Surviving Katyn: Stalin’s Polish Massacre and the Search for Truth (Oneworld)

Leone Ross, This One Sky Day (Faber)

Sunjeev Sahota, China Room (Harvill Secker)

Sathnam Sanghera, Empireland (Viking)

Julian Sayarer, Iberia (Fox, Finch & Tepper Ltd)

Anita Sethi, I Belong Here (Bloomsbury Wildlife)

Elif Shafak, The Island of Missing Trees (Penguin)

Stephanie Sy-Quia, Amnion (Granta Poetry)

Joelle Taylor, C+nto & Othered Poems (The Westbourne Press)

Lea Ypi, Free (Allen Lane)