British author Bernardine Evaristo poses with her book Girl, Woman, Other. She would later win the 2019 Booker Prize for Fiction, an honor she shared with Margaret Atwood.

Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other has been shortlisted for The Orwell Prize for Political Fiction.

Sponsored by The Orwell Foundation and conferred in honor of English author and social critic George Orwell, the Orwell Prizes aim to “encourage good writing and thinking about politics” as winning entries are more or less required to “strive to meet Orwell’s own ambition ‘to make political writing into an art’”.

The prize is awarded in four categories: Political Writing Book Prize, Political Fiction Book Prize, Journalism Prize and Exposing Britain’s Social Evils Prize.

Joining Evaristo on the Political Fiction Book Prize shortlist are the Pulitzer Prize winning- author Colson Whitehead for The Nickel Boys, Edna O’Brien for Girl, Attica Locke for Heaven My Home, John Lanchester for The Wall, and Lucy Ellmann for Ducks, Newburyport. 

The judges for the 2020 Political Fiction book prize include Jude Kelly CBE (Chair), Matthew Sperling, Sarah Shaffi and Tom Gatti. They described Girl, Woman, Other as:

A worldly, compassionate and detailed depiction of the lives of different generations of black women attempting to achieve self-realisation against the forces of classic family conservatism and within a society structured to maintain white supremacy. Piercingly funny even as it welcomes the reader into the complexities of being a female parent, child, lover, and an ambitious traveller through life when no one has yet provided a suitable guide book.

The winners will be revealed at a special event on 25th June 2020.

It is worthy to note that, like Evaristo, the winner of the 2019 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction Anna Burns had also won the Booker Prize for her novel Milkman.

We are stoked for Bernardine Evaristo!