2013-2016 Long and Short Lists

Claire-Louise Bennett

Pond​

(Fitzcarraldo Editions)​​

Tania James

The Tusk that did the Damage

(Harvill Secker [UK]; Alfred A. Knopf [US])

Frances Leviston

Disinformation

(Picador)

Andrew McMillan

Physical

(Jonathan Cape)

WINNER 2016

Max Porter

Grief is the Thing with Feathers

(Faber & Faber)​

Sunjeev Sahota

The Year of the Runaways

(Picador)

Claire-Louise Bennett

Pond​

(Fitzcarraldo Editions)​​

Garth Risk Hallberg

City on Fire

(Jonathan Cape)​

Tania James

The Tusk that did the Damage

(Harvill Secker [UK]; Alfred A. Knopf [US])

Frances Leviston

Disinformation

(Picador)

Lisa McInerney

The Glorious Heresies

(John Murray)​

Andrew McMillan

Physical

(Jonathan Cape)

Thomas Morris

We Don’t Know What We’re Doing

(Faber & Faber)​​​​​

Chigozie Obioma

The Fishermen

(ONE, an imprint of Pushkin Press)

Julia Pierpont

Among the Ten Thousand Things

(Oneworld)  

WINNER 2016

Max Porter

Grief is the Thing with Feathers

(Faber & Faber)​

Sunjeev Sahota

The Year of the Runaways

(Picador)

Laura van den Berg

Find Me

(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries (Granta)

Eleanor Catton was born in 1985 in Canada and raised in Christchurch, New Zealand.  

She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and currently teaches creative writing at Manukau Institute of Technology in Auckland.

Her debut novel The Rehearsal (2008) was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the Dylan Thomas Prize, and longlisted for the Orange Prize. Her second novel, The Luminaries, won the 2013 Man Booker Prize and the 2013 Governor General’s Literary Award.

Joshua Ferris (WINNER 2014), To Rise Again at a Decent Hour (Viking)

Joshua Ferris was born in Illinois in 1974.

In addition to To Rise Again At A Decent Hour, he is the author of two previous novels: Then We Came to the End, which was nominated for the National Book Award, won the PEN/Hemingway Award and was longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, and the highly acclaimed The Unnamed.

In 2010 Joshua Ferris was selected for The New Yorker's '20 Under 40' list of fiction writers.  He lives in New York.

Eimear McBride, A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing (Faber & Faber)

Eimear McBride was born in 1976 and grew up in the west of Ireland. In 1994, aged seventeen, she went to London and spent the next three years studying acting at Drama Centre. Much of her twenties were spent temping and travelling.

At twenty-seven she wrote A Girl is a Half-formed Thing. It won the 2013 Goldsmiths Prize, was shortlisted for the 2014 Folio Prize and won the 2014 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction. Eimear moved to Cork in 2006, and Norwich in 2011, where she still lives with her husband and daughter.  She is currently working on her second novel.

Kseniya Melnik, Snow in May (Fourth Estate)

Kseniya Melnik was born in Magadan in the northeast of Russia and immigrated to Alaska in 1998, at the age of fifteen.

The New York Times said “Snow in May,” "takes us deep into the complex fabric of Magadan, an isolated fishing and mining town in the northern reaches of Russia that once served as a transit center for prisoners dispatched to Stalin’s labor camps."

She earned an MFA from New York University. Her work has appeared in Brooklyn Rail, Epoch, Prospect, Virginia Quarterly Review, and was selected for Granta's New Voices series.  She lives in El Paso, Texas.

Kei Miller, The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion (Carcanet Press)

Kei Miller was born in Jamaica in 1978.

His poetry has been shortlisted for awards such as the Jonathan Llewelyn Rhys Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Scottish Book of the Year.

His fiction has been shortlisted for the Phyllis Wheatley Prize, the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First book and has won the Una Marson Prize. In 2013 the Caribbean Rhodes Trust named him the Rex Nettleford Fellow in Cultural Studies. 

Owen Sheers, Mametz (National Theatre Wales)

Owen Sheers has written two collections of poetry, The Blue Book and Skirrid Hill, which won a Somerset Maugham award.

His verse drama Pink Mist won Wales Book of the Year and the Hay Festival Poetry Medal. His non-fiction includes The Dust Diaries and Calon: A Journey to the Heart of Welsh Rugby. His first novel Resistance has been translated into ten languages and was made into a film in 2011.  His plays include The Passion, The Two Worlds of Charlie F. and Mametz. Owen wrote and presented BBC Four's 'A Poet's Guide to Britain'.  His second novel I Saw A Man will be published by Faber in 2015.

Naomi Wood, Mrs Hemingway (Picador)

Naomi Wood was born in 1983 and lives in London.

She studied at Cambridge and at UEA for her MA in Creative Writing.

Originally from York, she has gone on to live in Hong Kong, Paris and Washington DC.

She is the author of The Godless Boys and Mrs. Hemingway.

James Brookes, Sins of the Leopard (Salt Publishing)

Tim Leach, The Last King of Lydia (Atlantic Books)

Prajwal Parjajuly, The Gurkha's Daughter (Quercus)

Marli Roode, Call It Dog (Atlantic Books)

Majok Tulba, Beneath the Darkening Sky (OneWorld)

Claire Vaye Watkins (WINNER), Battleborn (Granta)