The Royal Society of Literature (RSL) has announced the longlist for the 2019 Ondaatje Prize, and on it are Aminatta Forna, for her fourth novel and fifth book Happiness, and Emmanuel Iduma, for his second book and first collection of essays A Stranger’s Pose.
Named after Christopher Ondaatje, the annual £10,000 Ondaatje Prize, which incorporates the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize, is for a fiction, poetry or nonfiction book that evokes the “spirit of a place.” It is open only to writers who are citizens of, or are resident in, the Commonwealth or Ireland. The prize, which usually does not announce a longlist, has done so this year in celebration of its 15th anniversary.
Here is the longlist in full.
| Rania Abouzeid | No Turning Back | (Oneworld) |
| Sam Byers | Perfidious Albion | (Faber & Faber) |
| Edward Carey | Little | (Aardvark Bureau) |
| Jonathan Coe | Middle England | (Viking) |
| Aida Edemariam | The Wife’s Tale | (4th Estate) |
| Aminatta Forna | Happiness | (Bloomsbury Circus) |
| Gaia Holmes | Where the road runs out | (Comma Poetry) |
| Christopher Hope | The Café de Move-on Blues | (Atlantic Books) |
| Emmanuel Iduma | A Stranger’s Pose | (Cassava Republic) |
| Alice Jolly | Mary Ann Sate, Imbecile | (Unbound)) |
| Patrick Langley | Arkady | (Fitzcarraldo Editions) |
| Jamal Mahjoub | A Line in the River | (Bloomsbury Publishing) |
| Sarah Moss | Ghost Wall | (Granta Books) |
| S.K. Perry | Let Me Be Like Water | (Melville House UK) |
| Donal Ryan | From a Low and Quiet Sea | (Doubleday) |
| Heidi Sopinka | The Dictionary of Animal Languages | (Scribe UK) |
| Guy Stagg | The Crossway | (Picador) |
| Malachy Tallack | The Valley at the Centre of the World | (Canongate) |
| Isabella Tree | Wilding | (Picador) |
| Adam Weymouth | Kings of the Yukon | (Particular Books) |
The 2019 judges are RSL Fellows Sabrina Mahfouz, Michèle Roberts, and Ian Thomson.
The shortlist will be announced on 16 April, at an RSL event themed “The Spirit of a Place.” The winner will be announced a month afterwards on 13 May.
Congratulations to Aminatta Forna and Emmanuel Iduma.
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