Monday 28 April 2014

Chimamanda Adichie, others nominated for Baileys Women's Prize





An award winning Nigerian writer, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has been shortlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction.
The author of Half of a Yellow Sun, a novel that won a prize in 2007, was shortlisted for Americanah alongside other writers such as: Donna Tartt, for The Goldfinch, first-time novelists Hannah Kent, for Burial Rites; Audrey Magee, for The Undertaking; and Eimear McBride for A Girl Is A Half-formed Thing.
Criteria for selection comprise: “Any woman writing in English - whatever her nationality, country of residence, age or subject matter - is eligible. The literary prize was funded privately in 2013 with liqueur company Baileys announced as the new sponsor in June. This year's winner will be announced at London's Royal Festival Hall on June 4. The shortlist, announced in central London on Monday night, features two Irish authors - Magee and McBride. Tartt is American, Kent is Australian and London-born Lahiri grew up in the US where she now lives. Tartt was shortlisted in 2003 for The Little Friend while Adichie was shortlisted the following year for Purple Hibiscus,” the organisers stated.
Describing her development as a writer, between her books Purple Hibiscus, Half of a Yellow Sun and Americanah, Adichie says ‘they are such different books, and I think I wrote them from very different places in my life, emotionally.’
According to her ‘For Purple Hibiscus, I was very homesick, I was in the US. Suddenly I was romanticizing the hibiscus flowers in our front yard and I wrote this book, about missing home, nostalgia. Half of a Yellow Sun was so different. I knew I was writing about this very intense, contested history and I did so much research, and I cried a lot when I was writing it. My grandfathers died in Biafra, and here I was kind of mining the pain of my family.’
‘Then Americanah, I laughed a lot writing it. It's just very different, I don't so much see it as a kind of linear progression - the books. It's sort of more just like occupying different parallel spaces,’ Adichie explained. Americanah won the US National Critics Book Prize last month.
US author, AM Homes, beat the double Booker-winning author Hilary Mantel with her satire May We Be Forgiven last year to win Baileys Women's Prize.

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