The longlist for the 2024 Women’s Prize for Fiction is out and two African authors have made it in! They are Ethiopian-American author Maya Binyam and Liberian-born Ghanaian writer Peace Adzo Medie.
The Women’s Prize for Fiction was established in 1996 to highlight and remedy the imbalance in coverage, respect, and reverence given to women writers versus their male peers, creating a platform for exceptional writing by women to shine. The Prize is awarded annually to the author of the best full-length novel of the year written in English and published in the UK. The winner receives £30,000 and a bronze statuette.
In its 29th year, the Women’s Prize for Fiction champions ambitious, inspiring and thought-provoking novels written by women in English. The judging panel for the 2024 Prize includes chair Monica Ali, Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀, Laura Dockrill, Indira Varma, and Anna Whitehouse.
The 16 books on the longlist celebrate the power of individuality and more than half the list is made up of debut authors including Binyam and Medie. Binyam was chosen for her debut novel Hangman, while Medie was selected for her second novel Nightbloom.
Maya Binyam lives in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in the Paris Review, the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, New York, Bookforum, Columbia Journalism Review, the New York Times Book Review, Best American Short Stories, and elsewhere. She is an advisory editor at the Paris Review.
Peace Adzo Medie is a Liberian-born Ghanaian academic and writer of both fiction and nonfiction. In 2020, she published her debut novel His Only Wife as well as her scholarly work Global Norms and Location Action: The Campaigns to End Violence Against Women in Africa.
Congrats to Binyam and Medie!
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