The Bun vs. The Women’s Prize 2018

The Women’s Prize for Fiction — previously known as the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction — is one of the UK’s biggest literary prizes, founded in 1996 in response to the all-male Booker Prize shortlist in 1991. To be considered for the award, a novel must have been written in English and published in the UK in the previous year.

Here at the Bun we (Lydia Barnes and Ellie McAllister) have been reading the shortlist, and in the week leading up to the announcement of the winner on June 6th, we’ll be reviewing each one individually. So if you have your eye on a few of them but aren’t sure which might be worth picking up, we got your back!

This week, we will review each of the following books written by women in the past year that made the 2018 shortlist:

• Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward
• When I Hit You: Or, a Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife by Meena Kandasamy
• Sight by Jessie Greengrass
• Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie
• The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock by Imogen Hermes Gowar
• The Idiot by Elif Batuman