Kamila Shamsie’s “Home Fire” has been named this year’s recipient of the Women’s Prize for Fiction, The Guardian confirms. The prestigious honor recognizes the best novel of the year written in English by a female author and includes a £30,000 award, amounting to roughly $40,000 USD. Loosely based on Sophocles’ “Antigone,” the British Pakistani author’s seventh novel takes place in multiple countries and follows three orphaned siblings, one of whom becomes involved with ISIS.
Chair of judges Sarah Sands said the panel “chose the book which we felt spoke for our times,” adding, “‘Home Fire’ is about identity, conflicting loyalties, love, and politics. And it sustains mastery of its themes and its form.” The BBC editor continued, “Shamsie is funny and exact about the Muslim experience, what it means to be challenged on your identity, what it means choosing between public and private.” “To humanize a political story in that way really does show what literature can do, that it can tackle a hard subject that otherwise would never have that sense of layered sympathy and understanding,” she observed. “It really advanced our understanding of the whole issue of identity.”
This year’s short list included Jesmyn Ward’s National Book Award-winning “Sing, Unburied, Sing,” a portrait of a family in Mississippi, and Imogen Hermes Gowar’s “The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock,” a story about mermaids set in 1785.
Shamsie has been shortlisted for the Women’s prize twice before, and has said that the award helps “create a space for women in a male-dominated world, giving voice and space to those who wouldn’t find them elsewhere.” Her other novels include “Burnt Shadows” and “A God in Every Stone.”
“I have absolutely loved immersing myself in women’s fiction for a year, it’s been an absolute privilege,” an enthusiastic Sands remarked.
Formerly known as the Orange Prize and the Baileys Prize, the Women’s Prize for Fiction launched in 1996. Naomi Alderman took home last year’s Prize for “The Power,” a sci-fi novel that sees girls and women gaining the power to emit electric shocks at will. Previous winners include Zadie Smith, Helen Dunmore, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
