Books of the Year 2018

It’s been an unusual reading year for me; new work has meant I’ve read lots of things I wouldn’t have otherwise and it’s no coincidence that, for the first time, there’s a poetry collection included here. It’s also the first time there’s been a graphic novel in my list, although I’ve confused myself here as The One Hundred Nights of Hero is one of my favourite books and I’ve no idea why it didn’t make the list last year. Anyway, here’s my favourite fifteen books published in 2018, if there’s a theme to the list it’s this: feminist as fuck.

Milkman – Anna Burns

Until last week, I’d known what my book of the year was since May. And then I read Milkman. An eighteen-year-old woman walks the streets of what appears to be Belfast, although the setting is never named, reading classic literature. An encounter with a paramilitary man called Milkman sets off rumours about her and him, leading to an increasingly claustrophobic atmosphere in which the community, and her own family, draw conclusions from hearsay. Since Milkman won this year’s Booker Prize, much has been made of its apparently challenging nature. To me, it read like someone telling an anecdote in the pub, the story both moving forwards and circling back, characters known by nicknames and monikers. It’s a superb read: often funny, resolutely feminist, and possibly the best book about the Troubles I’ve read.

Ghost Wall – Sarah Moss

This is the book that was knocked off the number one spot at the last minute. Ghost Wall is the story of teenager, Silvie, as she takes part in an Iron Age reconstruction with her family. Her father is particularly keen that things should be as authentic as possible and it soon becomes clear that his views on women are severely outdated. The tension builds until a horrific act is committed. Moss’ writing is taut, sharp and will keep you on edge. My mini-review is here.

Everything Under – Daisy Johnson

When I read Everything Under earlier in the year, I described it on Twitter as spellbinding, the first time I’ve ever described a novel as such; the prose is mesmerising though. Gretal works as a lexicographer and is attempting to get Sarah, her estranged mother, to tell her story, allowing Gretal to fill in the gaps in her adolescence. Johnson reworks the Oedipus myth as an exploration of gender and mother/daughter relationships. Absolutely worthy of its place on the Booker Prize shortlist.

America Is Not the Heart – Elaine Castillo

Hero is an illegal immigrant, a member of the New People’s Army, a former prisoner of war. She leaves the Philippines to live with her uncle’s family, who she hasn’t seen in years. In San Fransisco, she begins to rebuild her life and makes friends who’ll become her new family. Castillo explores ideas of home through language, food, family, friendship and love. Big, bold and absorbing. My full review and interview with Elaine is here.

Three Poems – Hannah Sullivan

I wouldn’t have read Three Poems if Hannah Sullivan hadn’t been booked for Manchester Literature Festival and I’m so glad she was. Poem one tells of the narrator’s time in New York, living and dating; two of moving to California and repetition, and three of the birth of her son and the death of her father. As a whole, it’s an impressive piece of work, while individual lines have stayed with me for months.

Whiskey & Ribbons – Leesa Cross-Smith

Eamon is killed when his wife, Evi, is nine-months pregnant. In the grief that follows, Dalton, Eamon’s adopted brother moves in to support Evi in raising Noah. As Evi and Dalton try to come to terms with their loss, they begin to grow closer. A beautifully written story of love, loss and longing. The story’s expanded from some pieces in Cross-Smith’s debut short story collection Every Kiss a War which I reviewed here.

The Best We Could Do – Thi Bui

Triggered by the birth of her first child, Thi Bui tells the story of her parents emigrating to the USA, intertwined with the history of Vietnam. Through it she begins to understand the experiences which shaped her parents and herself. Compelling and beautifully illustrated.

The Book of Joan – Lidia Yuknavitch

Christine Pizan is in her final year on CIEL and she’s planning to go out in spectacular style. She’s creating a skin graft telling the true story of Joan of Dirt, a story which has been outlawed by CEIL’s ruler, Jean de Men. Fierce, feminist and concerned with climate change, I’m still reeling from The Book of Joan ten months later. My full review is here.

To Throw Away Unopened – Viv Albertine

Viv Albertine’s second memoir is more personal than her first and all the better for it. Alongside the end of her marriage and her foray into dating again, she reconsiders her upbringing after the death of her father and the discovery of a bag of documents previously unseen. This is also considered alongside the death of her mother, which is detailed gradually as the book progresses and also her relationship with her sister which culminates in an unforgettable scene at their mother’s hospital bed. A powerful look at family stories and relationships and the impact they have on women.

The Silence of the Girls – Pat Barker

Another discovery thanks to Manchester Literature Festival. Pat Barker’s retelling of The Iliad focuses on Briseis, largely telling the tale from her perspective. It’s brutal and brash, showing the men for spoilt, squabbling brats while giving women a voice in one of the oldest stories in literature. My full review is here.

Melmoth – Sarah Perry

Melmoth is condemned to wander the world, watching and collecting those of us who’ve been complicit in acts of harm. While Helen Franklin discovers the various accounts of Melmoth, Perry uses them as a vehicle to bear witness to atrocities from the Holocaust to the violent deportation of immigrants, forcing the reader to question their complicity. Compelling and uncomfortable reading. My mini-review is here.

Sight – Jessie Greengrass

There was a spate of books considering motherhood this year, Sight was one of the best. The narrator documents her thinking about whether or not she should become a parent alongside her memories of her grandmother, a psychoanalyst; the death of her mother, and medical developments including the creation of the X-ray. Clever and exquisitely written.

The Incendiaries – R.O. Kwon

Phoebe Lin, a student at an elite NY university, is drawn into a cult intent on committing a terrorist act. Outsider, Will Kendall becomes close to Phoebe and, following her disappearance, tells the story of their relationship and what he knows about cult leader, John Leal. Compelling.

Places I Stopped on the Way Home – Meg Fee

Sometimes you read a book at the perfect time and Places I Stopped on the Way Home was one of them. Fee writes about her time in NYC, dating, living in shared houses, managing her recovery from an eating disorder, and what she learned about how to live. I underlined a lot. My review is here.

Snap – Belinda Bauer

In the first chapter of Snap, Jack and his sisters are left in the family car, on the hard shoulder of the motorway, as their mum goes to telephone for help. She never returns. It seems as though this is going to be a straight psychological thriller until chapter two jumps three years. Now Jack and his siblings live alone, the police are investigating a cat burglar they’ve called Goldilocks and pregnant Catherine has found a knife and a threatening note next to her bed. This is crime if it was written by Kate Atkinson and Lissa Evans; it’s about people not being who you think they are and what family will do to protect each other. It’s also very funny. I stayed up late to finish it in one sitting.

The Women’s Prize for Fiction 2018 Shortlist

The Women’s Prize for Fiction shortlist was announced very early this morning on BBC Radio 4 after the list was leaked. On it are three debut novels, although only The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock is a first book. Elif Batuman previously published a non-fiction book The Possessed and Jessie Greengrass published an excellent short story collection, An Account of the Decline of the Great Auk According to One Who Saw It, which won The Edge Hill Prize and was shortlisted for Sunday Times/PFD Young Writer Award (winning the shadow panel prize for which I was a judge).

Those of you who read the blog regularly will know that I am a huge fan of Meena Kandasamy and her second novel When I Hit You in particular. It was my book of the year last year and my favourite to win the prize.

The more established novelists who complete the shortlist are Kamila Shamsie for Home Fire and Jesmyn Ward for Sing, Unburied, Sing which has already taken the National Book Award in the USA. I loved Home Fire, it’s gripping, nuanced and utterly relevant. Sing, Unburied, Sing is beautifully told and completely heart-breaking. I sobbed through the last three chapters.

The list shares four titles with our shadow panel shortlist and four with my own personal list. The title missing that the shadow panel and I expected to see is Elmet. I hope it’s inclusion on a number of prize lists in the past few months means that people do read it.

The winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2018 will be announced on June 6th.

The Women’s Prize for Fiction 2018 Shadow Panel Shortlist

With the official Women’s Prize for Fiction shortlist due today, here’s the books the shadow panel felt should make the shortlist.

I’ve reviewed three so far, if you click on the covers of Elmet, A Boy in Winter and Home Fire it will take you to my reviews. The rest are on their way!

This is the fourth year I’ve run a panel and it was our most varied discussion yet. We’ve never had such a wide range of opinions on the same set of books, which mirrors both the range and quality of the longlist. We also discovered that some of us fundamentally disagree on what constitutes fiction and what its job should be. That introduced an interesting element to our conversation!

We’re looking forward to seeing what makes the official shortlist. Apparently the announcement is happening this morning on BBC Radio 4…

The Women’s Prize for Fiction Longlist 2018

Here it is, the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2018 longlist. Initial thoughts are that I’m very excited. This is a great list. Two of my favourite books of last year are there – When I Hit You by Meena Kandasamy and Elmet by Fiona Mozley – and one of my favourites so far this year – Sight by Jessie Greengrass. One of my all-time favourite writers, Nicola Barker, makes the longlist for the first time with her twelfth novel H(A)PPY. I haven’t read it yet because I’ve been wanting time to sit and savour it, which never happens, so I’m delighted to have to make that time now. The book and writer I hadn’t heard of is Miss Burma by Charmaine Craig. I love that this list always produces at least one new to me writer. The other thing that’s really pleasing is that seven of the sixteen writers are women of colour, by far the highest number we’ve ever seen from this prize and about time too.

Here’s the list in full. I’ve linked to my reviews of the four I’ve already covered and will return to this page to link the rest as I work my way through the rest of the list.

H(A)PPY – Nicola Barker

The Idiot – Elif Batuman

Three Things About Elsie – Joanna Cannon

Miss Burma – Charmaine Craig

Manhattan Beach – Jennifer Egan

The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock – Imogen Hermes Gower

Sight – Jessie Greengrass

Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine – Gail Honeyman

When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife – Meena Kandasamy

Elmet – Fiona Mozley

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness – Arundhati Roy

See What I Have Done – Sarah Schmidt

A Boy in Winter – Rachel Seiffert

Home Fire – Kamila Shamsie

The Trick to Time – Kit de Waal

Sing, Unburied, Sing – Jesmyn Ward

My Women’s Prize for Fiction Wishlist

It’s that time of year again. On Thursday 8th March, International Women’s Day, the longlist for the Women’s Prize for Fiction will be announced. The list will comprise of twelve books (if they stick to their own rules this year) written by female writers in English and published in the UK between 1st April 2017 and 31st March 2018.

I call this my wishlist because it’s somewhere between a prediction and what I’d like to see longlisted. I’ve never successfully identified more than half of the longlisted books but reading titles I might otherwise never have chosen is part of the pleasure of shadowing the prize.

I’ve reviewed the first three, click on the covers to read.

  

Interview with Jessie Greengrass + Giveaway

Giveaway now closed.

After revealing that our shadow panel Young Writer of the Year winner is An Account of the Decline of the Great Auk, According to One Who Saw It, I’m delighted to bring you an interview with the writer of that collection, Jessie Greengrass.

All the protagonists of the stories in your collection are isolated in some way; did you deliberately set out to write a collection about isolation?

I didn’t deliberately set out to write a collection at all- I was writing very much from one story to the next, and so the themes that emerge are just those things which interested me at the time. I wasn’t trying to explore isolation specifically but was very interested (as I still am) in the attempts that people make to describe their own subjective experience of themselves- to make public through its articulation what is by definition private. Coming up against the limits of language is profoundly lonely- that awareness of the singularity of being a subject, our experiences overlapping with those of other people but never intersecting with them- and I think most of the protagonists in the stories are struggling with some version of this problem, and their isolation is proportional to their inability to find a solution to it.

Isolation isn’t the only reoccurring theme or idea: there’s also death, animals and the sea. Is there a point where you begin to notice your preoccupations and use them to your advantage?

I think there’s definitely a point- and it really came after I’d finished these stories- where  I started to notice stuff that was recurring and thought that I needed to be careful about it. It’s easy for certain images to become a kind of mental shorthand- a cliche, really- and I think the longer you’ve been writing the harder you have to try to find new ways of talking about whatever it is you’re trying to talk about, which is as it should be. So I’m definitely imagining a future of fewer animals and less sea. Death is a pretty big topic though so I think I’m safe there, and in general I can’t imagine my subject matter changing all that much. I sometimes think that it might be time to try writing about people who are happy, or at least who are unanxious, but I can’t imagine it. They’re just a blank. What is there to say about them? Do they even exist? People who don’t spend their time feeling vaguely unnerved by the difference between the way they feel and the way other people see them? Plus it’s just the way things come out for me. It’s a long running joke in our house that everything I write is miserable. Even shopping lists.

Very few of the characters in the contemporary stories are named or gendered. Did you have genders in mind when you were writing?

I did, just as a kind of side-effect of needing to construct voices for them, but I made a very conscious effort to keep as many details as I could of the characters beyond their own thoughts out of the stories. The image that always hovered in mind was of Beckett’s Not I: the protagonist stripped back until they are nothing but speech, a voice in emptiness with no distraction from the struggle to articulate thought. All the characters are engaged in some kind of attempt at personal accounting and that’s fairly universal, I would have thought.

You studied philosophy; how much influence does philosophical thinking have on your fiction?

I think the influence is pretty clear in the work that I’ve done, although I also think that the reason that I chose philosophy as something to study in the first place was that my mind already worked in that way. The problems philosophy deals with felt very immediate to me but also the kind of abstractions used came fairly naturally and it was exciting, at the time, to find a mode of thought that allowed me to explore what I’d always blundered up against. Perhaps it was the result of a particular kind of anxiety and the fact that I was simultaneously able to be anxious and to find my own anxiety interesting (or just a tendency to try and draw universal conclusions from a really, really limited evidence base). So I think a few years of the dedicated reading of analytical philosophy solidified that way I think, and given me a language for it, but I also think that I was a bit that way to start with. Whatever that way is.

You write predominantly in complex sentences, often with multiple clauses. How did your style develop? Who or what inspires you?

I’m not sure there’s a clear answer to this, beyond the fact that it’s a little bit of everything I’ve ever read, and given that I grew up a socially awkward only child I’ve read a lot. Different writers have absorbed me at different times and I’ve been left with a bit of each of them, an echo maybe, and all those put together make up the way that I write- which is literary tradition as a kind of untraceable theft, I suppose, although without it there would be no movement- we’d all be trying to write Don Quixote without having read it, like the chap from Borges. Notable personal phases have included a few obvious ones, like a Beckett phase, and then a couple of months where I read pretty much nothing but David Foster Wallace’s essays. I’ve loved Larkin consistently since by mid-teens and I had a big thing for Berryman’s Dream Songs in my early twenties, followed by a patch of reading a lot of Elizabeth Bishop, including her wonderful letters, and then there are some less obvious favourites, like Alan Garner- Owl Service and Red Shift in particular- and Russell Hoban, and M John Harrison whose work I find consistently extraordinary.

If you had to exchange places with a character in one of your stories, who would it be and why?

They’re all miserable sods living in really, really cold places so ideally none of them. My life has changed quite a lot in the last few years and so while I’m still interested in the same things I think I probably feel a bit less bleakly pessimistic about them- I suppose the only character I’d not actively mind being would be the narrator of Scropton, Sudbury, Marchington, Uttoxter which is the last story in the collection and the only one where I felt the narrator had reached some kind of resolution, or made peace with themselves.

Your collection won the Edge Hill Prize and is now shortlisted for The Sunday Times/Peters Fraser & Dunlop Young Writer of the Year Award; what does it mean to you to be recognised by these prizes?

On the one hand it’s enormously encouraging, and it’s great to feel that people like what I do, particularly when I’m half way through the next thing and it feels like it’s all completely, irredeemably awful and I obviously can’t write for toffee. There’s a boost of confidence. On the other hand the book is still the same book, the next book is still the same as it would have been- I’m probably going to be writing the same words whether anyone thinks they’re good or not. It repays the faith that my publishers have had in me though and I’m really grateful for that because they’ve been brilliant, both in taking a punt on a book of broadly plotless short stories about unhappy people in the first place, and in supporting me through to having the courage to write something new.

Are you working on anything at the moment? Can you tell us anything about it?

Yes! I’m about two thirds of the way through  what I’m variously referring to as “a thing”, “a sort of novel”, and “that poxy book”, depending on how I’m feeling about it on any given day. And I’m afraid at the moment that’s about all I can usefully say, except that I suppose in many ways it’s like a long form version of one of the stories- a first person narrative, quite reflective, but I hope a bit less tightly wound.

My blog focuses on female writers; who are your favourite female writers?

I find it so difficult to talk about favourite writers! But there are so many early- or mid- twentieth century women who aren’t read nearly as much now as I think they should be. Stevie Smith’s novels for example seem almost entirely forgotten about, and then people like Antonia White and Elizabeth Bowen, or F.M.Mayor who wrote the Rector’s Daughter. I re-read Isabel Colegate’s The Shooting Party recently which was absolutely as good as I remembered and I’ve also recently read Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard which is great.

If you want to find out more about Jessie’s superb short story collection, I have one copy to give away. All you need to do is leave a comment below. Entries are open until 5pm (UK) Sunday 4th December. The giveaway is open to readers in the UK and Ireland only. The winner will be drawn at random and notified as soon as possible after the close of entries.

Thanks to Jessie Greengrass for the interview and to The Sunday Times Peters Fraser + Dunlop Young Writer of the Year Award for the competition.

Thanks to everyone who entered the giveaway. I’ve allocated you a number in order of entry as follows:

1 – snoakes7001
2 – Cathy746Books
3 – Caroline Woolley
4 – Emma
5 – lizsmithtrailingspouse
6 – Jamilah
7 – Beverly
8 – Sofiane F
9 – Sally Pemberton

And consulted the random number generator. The winner is:

Congratulations Sally, check your email!

The Shadow Panel Winner of The Sunday Times Peters Fraser + Dunlop Young Writer of the Year Award

The Sunday Times Peters Fraser and Dunlop shadow panel – consisting of Charlie Place, Eric Anderson, Simon Savidge, Kim Forrester and myself – met last Saturday to choose our winner. The discussion was lively, interesting and thoughtful and eventually we arrived at our winner: Jessie Greengrass’ short story collection An Account of the Decline of the Great Auk, According to One Who Saw It.

As a panel, we felt this collection contained some stunning stories, worthy of winning standalone competitions. Collectively we loved ‘Winter, 2058’ and between us every single story had something of merit which we admired or just really enjoyed. We were also pleased to champion a short story collection; short stories seem to be a neglected form in terms of readership in the UK, which always seems to me to be an odd thing considering they fit perfectly into our busy lifestyles. Maybe this is the collection to tempt more people to engage with the form.

Huge congratulations to Jessie. There will be an interview with her on this very blog tomorrow, so please pop back then to discover more about the collection and this promising young writer.

The official winner of The Sunday Times Peters Fraser and Dunlop Young Writer of the Year Award will be announced on Thursday 8th December.

An Account of the Decline of the Great Auk, According to One Who Saw It – Jessie Greengrass

Jessie Greengrass’ amazingly titled short story collection An Account of the Decline of the Great Auk, According to One Who Saw It won The Edge Hill Short Story Prize 2016 and is now shortlisted for The Sunday Times/Peters Fraser & Dunlop Young Writer of the Year Award. It’s an ambitious collection ranging from historical fiction to post-apocalyptic futures with a number of themes and ideas uniting the pieces.

All of Greengrass’ protagonists are isolated in some way. This is clear from the opening story (from which the collection as a whole takes its title) in which the narrator relates their time spent in St. Kilda where their behaviour was responsible for the death of the Great Auk.

The first years we climbed out of the launch and we went ashore wading through them, hip deep, to find a flat place which we would clear of birds with a club swung about circular and, when the birds were cleared, in the gap they left we could see their eggs spread across the ground like a scree, like shingle, each the size of a fist and a half a fist. I have never seen so many eggs. These numbers deceived us. It was not possible to realise from that expanse that each egg represented only singularity: that each pair of birds laid only one egg, each spring, down on the bare rock. This truth did not become clear to us until their numbers had reduced to the point that we could, in fact, count them: the birds, the eggs. The number of the birds twice the number of the eggs.

It’s not just the sense of isolation – humans on a depopulated island in the Atlantic Ocean who are dominating and destroying nature – that makes this quotation (and many others I could’ve selected) significant, it’s Greengrass’ sentences which are mostly complex with multiple clauses and, in this instance, use some very effective repetition.

The natural world returns with Knut Knutsson who, on finally becoming captain after the death of his predecessor, has to bury his former boss and invest himself with only a penguin and a pair of albatross as witnesses to events. As well as with the character in 2058, stranded on a site on the North Yorkshire Moors watching for ‘intrusions’ – some sort of alien/hallucinogenic happening.

Greengrass juxtaposes these forays into nature with pieces set in confined spaces where narrators dream of escape: the siblings in an underground bunker in ‘Some Kind of Safety’ who don’t know whether or not the world above ground still exists; the call-centre worker in ‘The Politics of Minor Resistance’ who rebels by talking in an accent not their own, and the person in ‘All the Other Jobs’ who dreams of running away because ‘the territory around me failed to match the map I held’:

When I was a child, adults looked so self-assured, such excellent subjects to be the bearers of my faith and trust, and I thought that by the age of thirty I would have that surety; but as I write this I am one month past my thirty-first birthday and as terrified and uncertain as I was when I was ten, and now it is all other people who seem to know what I have never learned, who while perhaps still fallible are still less fallible than me, more weighty, their mistakes less the result of rank incompetence, their decisions more carefully made.

For me, however, where Greengrass excels is in her stories about relationships: in ‘On Time Travel’ when the narrator’s father dies suddenly, their friends avoid them, and they and their mother become trapped, ‘we hadn’t been a happy family, ever; and it was more this fact even more than the fact that he was gone which trapped us, me and my mother in the moment of his passing’, it’s a time in which the narrator and their friends ‘pretended hard to be ourselves’. In ‘Dolphin’ where the narrator recalls her parents’ marriage crumbling and one of the rare occasions on which her father took her out and left her to watch a dolphin show on her own, and in ‘The Comfort of the Dead’ when the protagonist begins to be visited by the dead, his marriage ends and he grows old.

They seemed to him to understand how so much of the time he felt himself to be failing to live up to a standard he had never explicitly accepted, how he felt himself to be only the shadow of that which he might have done but never would, this failure a constituent part of him, bred in; how faced with a choice between certain mediocrity and risky success he had picked the first, every time, and would again.

An Account of the Decline of the Great Auk, According to One Who Saw It is a confident collection exploring some fundamentally human issues through some of the most mundane of situations and some of the most extraordinary. It’s an interesting collection in which the stories are often densely packed with the narrator’s thoughts – this is very much a series of protagonists who tell you their stories. I’m interested to see where Greengrass goes next.

 

Thanks to The Sunday Times/PFD Young Writer of the Year Award for the review copy.

The Sunday Times Peters Fraser & Dunlop Young Writer of the Year Award Shortlist 2016

Here it is! The shortlist for The Sunday Times Peters Fraser and Dunlop Young Writer of the Year Award 2016. The shortlisted books and writers are:

An Account of the Decline of the Great Auk, According to One Who Saw It by Jessie Greengrass

Physical by Andrew McMillan

Grief Is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter

The Ecliptic by Benjamin Wood

Huge congratulations to the four shortlisted authors.

Generously sponsored by literary agency Peters Fraser + Dunlop, the prize is awarded annually to the best work of fiction, non-fiction or poetry by a British or Irish author aged between 18 and 35, and has gained attention and acclaim across the publishing industry and press. £5,000 is given to the overall winner and £500 to each of the three runners-up.

The shortlist was chosen by a judging panel comprised of acclaimed broadcaster James Naughtie, award winning historian Stella Tillyard, and The Sunday Times literary editor Andrew Holgate.

James Naughtie said: “These four authors have different voices, and they’re all original and powerful. No one could read this shortlist – whether one of the novels, the poems or the short stories – without feeling the presence of that talent. It springs from the pages. When you close the books you know you’re going to pick them up again and you also know, with certainty, that these writers are going to weave a lot of magic in years to come.”

Stella Tillyard said: “From a strong long-list we have chosen four books, each with a distinctive and original voice. These books are not only complete and new in themselves; they also show potential for the development of the writer and the genre. That’s a privilege and a thrill.”

Andrew Holgate said: “After the outstanding shortlist we came up with in 2015 for the relaunched Sunday Times / Peters Fraser + Dunlop Young Writer of the Year Award, I was, frankly, nervous about matching it this year. But I needn’t have worried. This is a sensationally strong list of books and writers, all of whom have a real future in literature, and any of whom as winner would stand comparison with the prize’s extraordinary list of past recipients.”

What’s interesting to me about the shortlist is that each book is a different form. An Account of the Decline of the Great Auk, According to One Who Saw It is a short story collection; Physical is a poetry collection; Grief Is the The Thing with Feathers is an experimental fiction novella, and The Ecliptic is a novel. Deciding how these different forms can be compared to each other is going to be a fascinating part of the judging process.

Obviously, however, I’m disappointed that the list is dominated by white males, especially after the 2015 shortlist was balanced both in terms of gender and PoC to white writers. What this means for my coverage of the prize is that I will review Jessie Greengrass’ short story collection and hopefully have some exciting extras around her book on this blog. Eric at Lonesome Reader and fellow shadow judge has kindly agreed to host my reviews of the other three books. We’re hoping you’ll follow and join in the discussions around the shortlisted titles. You can follow it on Twitter via the hashtag #YoungWriterAwardShadow.