The mighty Pulitzer declined to award a prize to any of the novels on the 2012 shortlist, which then made — according to a headline in the Arts section of the Wednesday 18 April 2012 issue of The New York Times — the publishers of the shortlisted books “cranky.”
Who cares? The Pulitzer is so yesterday. Let’s turn our attention to more important things, such as who is going to win The Orange Prize, “an annual prize in Britain that is awarded to a novel written by a women in English” (which is how the “Arts, Briefly” section of the Wednesday 18 April 2012 Times described it)
Here are the novels that made the Orange Prize for Fiction shortlist. Self browsed the web and found that “Four Northern Americans, including Booker-Prize winner Anne Enright, made the list” and that Georgina Harding is “the only one” of “six nominated authors” who is British (quoting from THE WEEK)
- Canadian Esi Edugyan’s Half Blood Blues
- Dublin writer Anne Enright’s The Forgotten Waltz: (Self doesn’t know why the Times article abbreviated the title of Enright’s novel to The Forgotten)
- Georgina Harding’s Painter of Silence: Self thinks this title is pretty fab.
- American Madeline Miller’s debut novel, Song of Achilles
- American Cynthia Ozick’s Foreign Bodies (Ozick’s seventh: According to the British paper The Guardian, Ozick is “the favourite” to win the Orange Prize)
- Previous Orange Prize winner (10 years ago, for Bel Canto) Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder
The winner, says the Times, will receive “a bronze statue and about $48,000.”
BTW, three of the shortlisted share the same publisher: Bloomsbury.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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