List: The Women's Prize for Fiction

The Women's Prize for Fiction is the 2013 name for the award formerly known as the Orange Prize for Fiction.  The prize is awarded to the woman who, in the opinion of the judges, has written the best, eligible full-length novel in English.  The award will have a new sponsor -- and presumably a new name -- later this year.

Something rubs me the wrong way about prizes based on gender (or race, for that matter) because they suggest an inability to compete in an open field.  But that does not stop me from appreciating that the winners may well be very good books, worth reading.

I am particularly interested in reading reviews of these books, so if anyone is working on this list, please leave a comment with the link to your reviews or progress posts and I will include your link in this post.  The Orange Prize Project is a blog devoted to winners of this prize, as well as books that make the long list and short list every year.

So far, I have read five of the winners.  Those I have read are in red; those on my TBR shelf are in blue.

2012 Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

2011 Téa Obreht, The Tiger's Wife

2010 Barbara Kingsolver, The Lacuna

2009 Marilynne Robinson, Home

2008 Rose Tremain, The Road Home

2007 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun

2006 Zadie Smith, On Beauty (reviewed here)

2005 Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin

2004 Andrea Levy, Small Island (reviewed here)

2003 Valerie Martin, Property

2002 Ann Patchett, Bel Canto (reviewed here)

2001 Kate Grenville, The Idea of Perfection (reviewed here)

2000 Linda Grant, When I Lived in Modern Times

1999 Suzanne Berne, A Crime in the Neighborhood

1998 Carol Shields, Larry's Party

1997 Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces

1996 Helen Dunmore, A Spell of Winter

NOTE

Last updated on March 20, 2013.

OTHERS READING THE WINNERS

Hotchpot Cafe's progress list

If you are reading these books, please leave comments with links to related posts and I will list them here.

Internet Review of Books

The April edition of The Internet Review of Books is out -- it has taken me almost a year to figure out that they publish on the 15th of each month, not the first. The IRB keeps getting better and better, qualitatively and quantitatively. There are 14 non-fiction reviews and seven fiction reviews this month, plus an interview with Mark Bauerlein, author of The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future, and a selection of Brief Reviews. I am pleased as punch that my review of Towers of Gold is included in such a fine selection.