My vote would, overwhelmingly, be for China Room. I’m awaiting a library hold of The Magician but I rather doubt my staying power with a 500-page biographical novel. I’ve already read the Brown and Keegan novellas and Sahota’s novel I DNFed the Riley. I’ve read another of poet Selima Hill’s collections so would gladly read this, too. Only one nonfiction title here: Philip Hoare going on (again) about whales. Everyone remarked on the attractive mint green colour scheme! I found myself slightly disappointed the Prize is usually more various since it includes nonfiction and poetry as well as fiction. My choice from the shortlist would have been Josie George’s A Still Life, but I can see how the judges might have felt, in an early year when precedents are still being set, that it was important to recognize fiction as being just as valid a way of writing about disability and chronic illness.Įarlier in the week, the Rathbones Folio Prize shortlist was announced. Today the second Barbellion Prize winner was announced: Lynn Buckle for What Willow Says, her lyrical novella about communication between a terminally ill woman, her deaf granddaughter, and the natural world.

However, I abandoned Here Comes the Miracle (from the latter) after 46 pages because it was just as When God Was a Rabbit as I feared. I’m currently reading Megan Nolan’s Acts of Desperation, doing double duty from the Dylan Thomas Prize longlist and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award shortlist, and enjoying it more than expected given the inevitable Sally Rooney comparisons and messed-up young female tropes.

Literary prize season will soon be in full swing, and can be overwhelming. I feel like my blogging is all over the place so far this month, but I’ll get back on track in the next couple of weeks with a few thematic roundups.

Sight by jessie greengrass