19.30, London, 5th June 2013 – American author A.M. Homes has won the 2013 Women’s Prize for Fiction with her sixth novel May We Be Forgiven (Granta).
2013 marks the eighteenth year of the Women’s Prize for Fiction, known from 1996 to 2012 as the Orange Prize for Fiction, which celebrates excellence, originality and accessibility in women’s writing from throughout the world.
At an awards ceremony at the Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre, London – hosted by Chair of the Women’s Prize for Fiction board, Kate Mosse – the 2013 Chair of Judges, Miranda Richardson, presented the author with the £30,000 prize and the ‘Bessie’, a limited edition bronze figurine. Both are anonymously endowed.
Miranda Richardson, Chair of Judges, said: “Our 2013 shortlist was exceptionally strong and our judges’ meeting was long and passionately argued, but in the end we agreed that May We Be Forgiven is a dazzling, original, viscerally funny black comedy – a subversion of the American dream. This is a book we want to read again and give to our friends.”
The Women’s Prize for Fiction was set up in 1996 to celebrate and promote fiction written by women throughout the world to the widest range of readers possible. The Women’s Prize is awarded to the best novel of the year written in English by a woman.
The judges for the 2013 Women’s Prize for Fiction are:
Miranda Richardson, (Chair), Actor
Razia Iqbal, BBC Broadcaster and Journalist
Rachel Johnson, Author, Editor and Journalist
Jojo Moyes, Author
Natasha Walter, Feminist Writer and Human Rights Activist
A.M. Homes
A.M. Homes is the author of two collections of short stories, Things You Should Know and The Safety of Objects, the novels Music for Torching, The End of Alice, In a Country of Mothers, Jack and the bestselling This Book Will Save Your Life, and the highly acclaimed memoir, The Mistress’s Daughter, all published by Granta Books. She is a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and writes frequently on arts and culture for numerous magazines and newspapers. She wrote and produced for the television series The L Word and is currently developing a major US TV series for HBO called The Hamptons. She lives in New York City.
Harry has spent a lifetime watching his younger brother, George – a taller, smarter and more successful high-flying TV executive – acquire a covetable wife, two kids and a beautiful home. But Harry, a historian and Nixon scholar, also knows George has a murderous temper, and when George loses control the result is an act so shocking that both brothers are hurled into entirely new lives, in which they both must seek absolution.
The awards took place in The Clore Ballroom of the Royal Festival Hall, central London. In addition to the Women’s Prize for Fiction winner announcement, aspiring novelist Susan Wallman was named as the winner of the Women’s Prize/Grazia First Chapter Competition for unpublished writers.
