So it’s International Women’s Day and, if there wasn’t already enough excitement surrounding the celebration of all the wonderful women in our personal lives and those who have shaped lives for women across the ages, the Women’s Prize for fiction has also released their 2018 longlist!

Set up in 1996, the Women’s Prize for Fiction (previously Bailey’s Prize and the Orange Prize) ‘celebrates excellence, originality and accessibility in women’s writing from throughout the world’. The winner receives £30,000 and a limited edition bronze known as a ‘Bessie’.

One of this years judges Sarah Sands said: “What is striking about the list, apart from the wealth of talent, is that women writers refuse to be pigeon-holed. We have searing social realism, adventure, comedy, poetic truths, ingenious plots and unforgettable characters. Women of the world are a literary force to be reckoned with.”

The books in the longlist are:

H(A)PPY by Nicola Barker
The Idiot by Elif Batuman
Three Things About Elsie by Joanna Cannon
Miss Burma by Charmaine Craig
Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan
The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock by Imogen Hermes Gowar
Sight by Jessie Greengrass
Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman
When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife by Meena Kandasamy
Elmet by Fiona Mozley
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy
See What I Have Done by Sarah Schmidt
A Boy in Winter by Rachel Seiffert
Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie
The Trick to Time by Kit de Waal
Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward

The shortlist will be announced on 23rd April and the winner announced on 6th June. Get reading and decide your favourites!!

Getting in the festive mood, here are 10 literature questions that you may come across over the holiday. How well will you do?

1. Holden Caulfield, an icon for teenage angst and rebellion, is a fictional character in which American literary classic?
2. Which book begins ‘It was a bright cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen’?
3. Which author, who passed away in 2016, was portrayed by Catherine Keener in the 2005 film Capote and by Sandra Bullock in the 2006 film Infamous?
4. ‘The villagers of Little Hangleton still called it ‘the Riddle House” is the start of which book?
5. Who collaborated with his daughter Lucy, in 2007, to write the children’s book George’s Secret Key to the Universe?
6. Which book starts with ‘I will not drink more than fourteen alcohol units a week’?
7. Which Italian novel for children has been adapted in over 240 languages?
8. Who wrote the line ‘These two very old people are the father and mother of Mr. Bucket’?
9. In Lewis Carroll’s ‘Alice in Wonderland’, which creature was used as the ball in the game of croquet?
10. Who wrote the award-winning fantasy novel, ‘Life of Pi’?

If you can resist checking on Google, the answers will be at the end of the next post! Enjoy!