Latest news with #Women'sprize
The Guardian
12-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
On my radar: Kit de Waal's cultural highlights
Born in Birmingham in 1960, Mandy Theresa O'Loughlin is better known as author Kit de Waal. After a career as a magistrate specialising in adoption and foster care, she studied creative writing at Oxford Brookes University. Her debut novel, My Name Is Leon, was published in 2016, winning the Kerry Group Irish novel of the year award. De Waal, who chairs this year's judging panel for the Women's prize for fiction, is a fellow at Birkbeck, University of London, where she set up a scholarship for writers from marginalised backgrounds. Her latest book, The Best of Everything, is out now (Tinder Press. Dr Strangelove, Noël Coward theatre This was just extraordinary. Steve Coogan, who played Dr Strangelove and three other characters, has such stage presence that you don't notice it's a translation. You think of him as a comedian, but he's a really, really good actor. It's not the same as the film, but it translates very well. The set was incredible. Obviously, there are resonances between what's going on now and Dr Strangelove. It's cleverly done – a brilliant production. Sean Foley, who adapted and directed it, is a genius. Two Women Wearing Cosmetic Patches, Compton Verney, Warwickshire Compton Verney is a beautiful art gallery. At the moment it's displaying this unusual 17th-century painting: often you've got a white woman next to a black woman, but the black woman is subservient. This is one of the few paintings where both women are the same size and position. They're wearing these little spots of paper in the shape of a sun, moon and stars. They were a vanity thing: 'Oh, look at me. I look fabulous.' They look very strange, in fact – like when a man has shaved and he's got a bit of toilet paper on his face. Scott Matthews I recently went to see Scott Matthews, a folk singer I absolutely adore. He has won an Ivor Novello award but he's very under the radar. I've probably seen him five times. He's a sign writer by trade, so a friend of mine got him to write out the lyrics to my favourite song of his, calligraphy style. It's called Mona, which was the inspiration for my second novel: it's about a woman who doesn't come home, and it's about yearning. His music's fantastic, but the lyrics are extraordinary. I think the only person who has lyrics as good is Joni Mitchell. Paris Noir, Centre Pompidou At the weekend I'm going to Paris, and I can't wait. This is an exhibition of 150 black artists in France from 1950 to 2000, tracing their influence on French life, Paris and the international scene. I saw that it was coming and I couldn't have got tickets any faster. I think it's great to have something dedicated to black art at such a prestigious venue. I really applaud them for doing that. The work being showcased in the publicity material looked incredible. Rachmaninov 2nd Piano Concerto by Candlelight, St Mary le Strand, London I go to hear this at least once a year – it's my favourite piece of music. I call it the theme music to Brief Encounter, which is probably a bit of an insult. It's a wonderful pairing of music and film: it speaks about sadness and deep love. I first saw the film when I was 18, and since then I can't bear to just hear one of the three movements. If ever I put it on, I make sure I've got 33 minutes to myself, so I can hear the whole thing. Whitby Abbey Last weekend, I went to Whitby and took the 199 steps up to Whitby Abbey to see where Bram Stoker got the inspiration for Dracula. It's very beautiful, atmospheric. I can absolutely see why he got the idea for a vampire from there. It's a gothic ruin on the top of a hill, overlooking the sea. It's black stone. While he was waiting for his wife to join him in Whitby, he found a book that talked about this count in Romania who used to kill his enemies with a stake through the heart, and he just put two and two together.
The Guardian
26-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Yuan Yang, Neneh Cherry and Rachel Clarke shortlisted for Women's prize for nonfiction
The Buffalo Stance singer Neneh Cherry, Labour MP Yuan Yang and the doctor Rachel Clarke have been shortlisted for this year's Women's prize for nonfiction. Foreign policy expert Chloe Dalton, marine biologist Helen Scales and biographer Clare Mulley also remain in contention for the £30,000 prize. A Thousand Threads by Neneh Cherry (Vintage) The Story of a Heart by Rachel Clarke (Abacus) Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton (Canongate) Agent Zo by Clare Mulley (Weidenfeld) What the Wild Sea Can Be by Helen Scales (Atlantic) Private Revolutions by Yuan Yang (Bloomsbury) 'Included in our list are narratives that honour the natural world and its bond with humanity, meticulously researched stories of women challenging power and books that illuminate complex subjects with authority, nuance and originality,' said judging chair and journalist Kavita Puri. Swedish musician Cherry was shortlisted for her memoir A Thousand Threads. 'Hers is a vivid tale of love, family, chaos and a creative spirit passed through the generations,' wrote Fiona Sturges of the audiobook version in the Guardian. Yang was chosen for Private Revolutions, her portrait of modern China told through the lives of four young women. Yang 'has written an engrossing new book that meticulously reports on a country in the throes of change', wrote Mythili Rao in a Guardian review. The winner of the prize will be announced on 12 June along with the winner of its sister award, the Women's prize for fiction. The nonfiction counterpart was announced in 2023 after research found that only 35.5% of books awarded a nonfiction prize over the prior decade were written by women, across seven UK nonfiction prizes. The prize's inaugural award went to Naomi Klein for her book Doppelganger. Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion Clarke was shortlisted this year for The Story of a Heart, in which she sets the story of two children connected by a heart transplant against the history of heart surgery. 'While there is much to be gleaned here about the minutiae of medical inventions and procedures, Clarke never loses sight of the human impact,' wrote Sturges in her Guardian review of the book. Dalton, who spent more than a decade working in parliament and the Foreign Office, was picked for her debut book Raising Hare, about rescuing a leveret during the pandemic. 'This is a sustained and patient attempt to cross the species abyss, and to see the world through the hare's eyes,' wrote Edward Posnett in the Guardian. 'It possesses a dream-like quality, and often reads as a fable of metamorphosis.' The shortlist is completed by Scales' What the Wild Sea Can Be, about the future of the ocean, and Mulley's Agent Zo, about Polish second world war resistance fighter Elżbieta Zawacka. 'These books will stay with you long after they have been read, for their outstanding prose, craftsmanship and what they reveal about the human condition and our world,' said Puri. Along with the six shortlisted books, titles longlisted for this year's prize were Autocracy, Inc. by Anne Applebaum, Embers of the Hands by Eleanor Barraclough, The Eagle and the Hart by Helen Castor, Ootlin by Jenni Fagan, Why Fish Don't Exist by Lulu Miller, By the Fire We Carry by Rebecca Nagle, Wild Thing by Sue Prideaux, The Peepshow by Kate Summerscale, Sister in Law by Harriet Wistrich and Tracker by Alexis Wright. Puri whittled down the longlist with fellow judges Leah Broad, Elizabeth Buchan, Elizabeth-Jane Burnett and Emma Gannon. 'It was such a joy to embrace such an eclectic mix of narratives by such insightful women writers,' said Puri. This year's prize was open to books published in the UK between 1 April 2024 and 31 March 2025. The prize is sponsored by online genealogy service Findmypast, and says it is actively seeking a second sponsor. To browse all of the books on the Women's prize for nonfiction 2025 shortlist visit Delivery charges may apply.
The Guardian
19-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Where to start with: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
She's won multiple awards for her novels, had her Ted talk sampled by Beyoncé, and was named one of Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People of 2015. Now, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is back with her first novel in 10 years – so if you haven't read anything by the Nigerian author yet, it's a good time to catch up. Writer and critic Maya Jaggi suggests some good ways in. Adichie's second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, not only won the Orange prize for fiction (now the Women's prize for fiction) in the year I was a judge, but also its Winner of Winners in 2020, and was made into a 2013 film with Chiwetel Ejiofor and Thandiwe Newton. It begins after Nigerian independence in 1960, telling the story of the Biafran war via 'The Master,' a maths lecturer in Nsukka (where Adichie grew up), his London-educated lover Olanna, and teenage houseboy Ugwu. The traumas of war are preceded by joyous intellectual jousting, fuelled by Ugwu's mouthwatering jollof rice and pepper soup. While Adichie once acknowledged to me her debt to Romesh Gunesekera's Sri Lanka-set novel Reef for this master chef culinary device, her breakthrough novel earns its place as a west African War and Peace. Adichie's essay The Danger of a Single Story, first given as a 2009 Ted talk (and available as an ebook), sets out her stall as a storyteller as succinctly as Orwell's 1946 essay Why I Write. Joining novelist Chinua Achebe's call for a 'balance of stories,' it echoes Binyavanga Wainaina's How to Write About Africa, the 2005 satirical bombshell in Granta magazine – reprinted in a posthumous 2022 collection for which his bereft friend Adichie wrote the introduction. 'Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story,' she writes – a flattening of experience that 'robs people' of human complexity and dignity while exaggerating their differences. 'Africa is a continent full of catastrophes … But there are other stories … just as important.' The consummate coming-of-age novel Purple Hibiscus, which won the Commonwealth Writers' prize for the best first book, explores faith, freedom, sexual awakening and religious hypocrisy through a 15-year-old girl, Kambili, growing up in south-eastern Nigeria after a military coup. Her father, a 'Big Man' factory owner, is a patriarch and religious zealot whose wife-beating tyranny devastates the family, even as he garners human rights awards for defying the new regime. Where the Catholic church demands prayer in Latin not Igbo, and cash-stuffed envelopes get things done, a brother's act of defiance leads ultimately to prison. Yet Kambili blossoms with a scholarly aunt in Nsukka, a university town where questioning and debate are encouraged not slapped down. To the strains of Fela Kuti, she exults because, for all its potholes, 'Nsukka could free something deep inside your belly that would rise up … and come out as a freedom song.' Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion The 600-page, tricontinental novel Americanah, winner of the US National Book Critics Circle award for fiction, is as much sharp observational comedy and critique as romance. Its heroine Ifemelu, a fellow at Princeton, is first seen having her hair braided for the journey home after 13 years away. Fleeing military-ruled Nigeria, she felt the burden and pathologies of race only in the US – as explored in her flâneur's blog, 'Raceteenth, or Various Observations About American Blacks (Those Formerly Known As Negroes) by a Non-American Black', which ranges from Barack Obama to the vexed politics of black hair. But her homesickness is partly for her first love, Obinze, the 'only person with whom she has never felt the need to explain herself'. Having failed in the visa lottery for the Land of the Free, he languished in London before making it as a property developer in his newly democratic homeland. As the novel traces their sundered lives towards reunion, the question is whether their love is beyond rekindling. **** We Should All Be Feminists speaks to successive generations of women and men in its efforts to reclaim feminism's high ground from a mighty backlash. Expanded from a 2012 Ted talk – since sampled on Beyoncé's Flawless – it bristles with outraged anecdotes and observations on how women are still taught to shrink and silence themselves, how gender bias becomes normalised through repetition, and how the cage of masculinity breeds men's fear of weakness and vulnerability. 'We must raise our daughters differently. We must also raise our sons differently,' Adichie writes in a book that could be read alongside her advice for parents, Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions. Embracing her great-grandmother, who ran off to marry the man of her choice, as a feminist avant la lettre, Adichie rebuts notions of feminism as 'unAfrican'. Published the year after her father's sudden death from kidney failure, Notes on Grief is a doting daughter's reckoning with her father's loss. It contains rare confidences from an author who guards her privacy, and a bracing confession of the rage and turmoil of mourning. Though the family met on Zoom, Adichie had not seen her father in the flesh for months when he died during lockdown, and her 'leaden heart' feels only fury at condolers' presumptuousness ('he is in a better place'). Flashes of obituary reveal a man, deputy vice-chancellor of the University of Nigeria in the 1980s and a leading professor of statistics, who had returned from doctoral studies at Berkeley shortly before the Biafran war, when all his books were burned by Nigerian soldiers. Years later, he was kidnapped for ransom because of his famous daughter. Yet his humour, 'already dry, crisped deliciously as he aged'. Was he 'the reason I have never been afraid of the disapproval of men?' Adichie asks. 'I think so.' Her first novel in 10 years, Dream Count, charts the interlinked lives and desires of four women during the Covid-19 pandemic. Adichie's mother, who died in 2021, was an inspiration for its mother-daughter relationships. Central is Chiamaka, a Nigerian travel writer living in the US, considering her body clock and missed opportunities. The character of Chiamaka's housekeeper, Kadiatou, was inspired by Nafissatou Diallo, the Guinean woman who in 2011 accused the then IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn of sexual assault in the New York hotel where she worked as a maid – though the case was dismissed because she was said to have lied about her background. 'A victim need not be perfect to be deserving of justice,' Adichie notes in the novel's afterword, arguing for the need for 'imaginative retellings'. Fleshing out this character while preserving as sacrosanct her account of the alleged assault, was, for Adichie, 'to 'write' a wrong in the balance of stories'. Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is published by 4th Estate (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
The Guardian
06-03-2025
- General
- The Guardian
Jenni Fagan's ‘visceral' memoir of growing up in care wins Gordon Burn prize
A memoir about growing up in care has won this year's Gordon Burn prize. Jenni Fagan was revealed as the winner of the £10,000 award for her book Ootlin at a ceremony in Newcastle on Thursday evening. Fagan described the win as a 'huge honour'. The prize will allow Ootlin to 'begin to reach a far wider audience', which is 'vital so this book can begin to influence policymakers', she said. 'It is my greatest hope that Ootlin is used to help stop other children in the care system falling through all safety nets as I did repeatedly.' By the age of seven, Fagan had lived in 14 different homes and had her name changed multiple times. 'There are a lot of kids out there being told they are less than everyone else. They are made unsafe by that story alone,' writes Fagan in the book, extracted for the Guardian. 'The government have a modern care system built on systems that are no longer fit for purpose,' she said after her win. 'It is time to change the story! We must see all children in the UK offered so much more. Safety, warmth, care, a home, food, an education and people who believe in them should be the very least of it.' Ootlin was also recently longlisted for the Women's prize for nonfiction. Along with the memoir, Fagan has written four novels – The Panopticon, The Sunlight Pilgrims, Hex and Luckenbooth, the latter shortlisted for the Gordon Burn prize in 2021 – as well as several poetry collections. 'Ootlin is a story about a girl who found her only true home in books, who via those stories began to imagine a place where she might truly belong,' said Fagan. Ootlin 'has haunted me since I read it, and it proudly moved me as both a work of art and a visceral contribution to an urgent and necessary debate about our care system and whether it is fit for purpose', said Claire Malcolm, the CEO of New Writing North and co-founder of the prize. The Gordon Burn prize celebrates writing that has an unconventional perspective, style or subject matter. Founded in 2012 by New Writing North, Faber & Faber and the Gordon Burn Trust, it is named after the English writer known for experimental works who died in 2009. Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion Shortlisted alongside Fagan for this year's prize were Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel, Mrs Jekyll by Emma Glass, Poor Artists by Gabrielle de la Puente and Zarina Muhammad (The White Pube), Only Here, Only Now by Tom Newlands, and The Lasting Harm: Witnessing the Trial of Ghislaine Maxwell by Lucia Osborne-Crowley. The judging panel for this year's prize comprised the writers Terri White, Carl Anka, Angela Hui, Sarah Phelps and David Whitehouse. The award is open to all writers of any nationality for work written in English and published in the UK the previous year. 'All of the books on the shortlist deserve recognition, but Jenni Fagan's Ootlin is a singular achievement,' said Whitehouse. 'Everything about it – the language, the rhythm, the approach, the subject, the author – conspires to make a beautiful, vital, difficult, human piece of art.' Past winners include Benjamin Myers, Peter Pomerantsev, Hanif Abdurraqib and Preti Taneja. Last year, Kathryn Scanlan won for her novel Kick the Latch.
The Guardian
14-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Guardian view on film awards: and the winner is…
The Guardian style guide advises writers to use the term 'actor' regardless of the performer's identity: 'avoid actress except when in name of award, eg Oscar for best actress'. As the awards season is upon us, this instruction goes to the heart of a question that has been asked behind the scenes – should we still have separate best actor and actress categories? Or are they exclusionary and outdated? There's no Academy award for best female sound engineer. Last year, Variety magazine reported that the Academy was considering eliminating the separate awards, following the example of the Grammys in 2012 and other film and TV honours since, but that this was still in early 'exploration'. The arguments in favour are that this would put male and female actors on an equal footing and include non-binary actors. The case against is the danger of fewer or no women at all being nominated: the Brits' decision to combine the best solo artist awards in 2022 was immediately followed by an all-male shortlist. Like the ceremonies themselves, dazzling parades of beautiful women in lovely dresses, the focus on the acting gongs obscures a less pretty reality elsewhere. It is no small irony that the only film written and directed by a woman that is up for major awards at the Baftas this Sunday and the Oscars next month is Coralie Fargeat's The Substance, a body horror movie satirising Hollywood's treatment of women. Last year, Barbie was nominated for best picture, but not, controversially, its director, Greta Gerwig. In the Oscars' 96 years, only three women have won best director. No woman has ever won best cinematographer, and only one best visual effects. These statistics are shocking, and partly reflect the underlying problem. Of all the films entered into the best director category at the Baftas this year, fewer than 25% were by women. As the Bafta chair, Sara Putt, said: 'We cannot dictate what is being made… we're at the end of that talent pipeline.' Film is not the only creative industry wrestling with these issues. This week the longlist for the Women's prize for non-fiction, now in its second year, was announced. Its sister prize for fiction has been dogged by charges of special‑pleading and irrelevance since its inception (as the Orange prize) nearly 30 years ago in response to 1991's all-male Booker prize shortlist. The late AS Byatt refused to allow her novels to be submitted on the grounds that the prize was 'sexist'. Yet the Women's prize has not only amplified and celebrated books by women, but books about women. Awards not only signal which individuals are valued, they also highlight whose stories are considered most culturally important. As Samantha Morton said in her moving Bafta fellowship award acceptance speech last year, 'Representation matters ... the stories we tell have the power to change peoples' lives.' According to this year's favourites (now Emilia Pérez is out of the running) – Conclave, The Brutalist and A Complete Unknown – these are still by and about men. Oppenheimer swept the Oscars last year. At a time when women's rights are being eroded across the world, the visibility and recognition of female artists is more vital than ever. Diversity in every sense should be better represented across every category. Everyone wins when talent is fairly recognised, but that will require change not only in awards but across the film industry.
