I år er det 20 år siden den aller første vinner av Baileys women`s prize for fiction ble kåret, og jeg har lyst til å feire dette med å lese alle bøkene som har vunnet disse årene. Liste over vinnerne finner du her.

Har ikke tenkt å ha noen frist på denne «utfordringen», og kommer til å lese bøkene som det faller seg. har et par av bøkene liggende og kommer til å begynne på de først.
Noen av bøkene er å finne på både man booker-listen og 1001, noe som slett ikke er noen ulempe med tanke på å sanke kryss på listene.

Prisen deles ut til en kvinnelig forfatter, uavhengig av hvilken nasjonalitet,som juryen mener har skrevet den beste romanen innenfor en gitt periode (1 april – 31 mars), og som har publisert denne aller først på engelsk.

På kvinnedagen 8.mars ble langlisten lagt frem og jeg har sett meg ut flere bøker der jeg kunne tenke meg å lese, blant annet en ny bok av forfatteren bak boken Olive Kitteridge.

I dag ble kortlisten lagt frem og den ser slik ut:

A little life av Hanya Yanagihara – Var på kortlisten til Man booker prisen i fjor.
When four graduates from a small Massachusetts college move to New York to make their way, they’re broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition. There is kind, handsome Willem, an aspiring actor; JB, a quick-witted, sometimes cruel Brooklyn-born painter seeking entry to the art world; Malcolm, a frustrated architect at a prominent firm; and withdrawn, brilliant, enigmatic Jude, who serves as their centre of gravity. Over the decades, their relationships deepen and darken, tinged by addiction, success, and pride. Yet their greatest challenge, each comes to realise, is Jude himself, by midlife a terrifyingly talented litigator yet an increasingly broken man, his mind and body scarred by an unspeakable childhood, and haunted by what he fears is a degree of trauma that he’ll not only be unable to overcome – but that will define his life forever.

The green road av Anne Enright – var på langlisten til Man Booker prisen og på kortlisten til Cosa Novel Award i fjor, og den eneste av disse bøkene jeg har lest.Omtalen min finner du her.
Hanna, Dan, Constance and Emmet return to the west coast of Ireland for a final family Christmas in the home their mother is about to sell. As the feast turns to near painful comedy, a last, desperate act from Rosaleen – a woman who doesn’t quite know how to love her children – forces them to confront the weight of family ties and the road that brought them home.

The improbability of love av Hannah Rothschild – Dette er en av bøkene jeg kunne tenke meg å lese før juni.
 When lovelorn Annie McDee stumbles across a dirty painting in a junk shop while looking for a present for an unsuitable man, she has no idea what she has discovered. Soon she finds herself drawn unwillingly into the tumultuous London art world, populated by exiled Russian oligarchs, avaricious Sheikas, desperate auctioneers and unscrupulous dealers, all scheming to get their hands on her painting – a lost eighteenth-century masterpiece called ‘The Improbability of Love’. Delving into the painting’s past, Annie will uncover not just an illustrious list of former owners, but some of the darkest secrets of European history – and in doing so she might just learn to open up to the possibility of falling in love again.

The portable veblen av Elizabeth Mckenzie- A riotously funny and deeply insightful adventure through capitalism, the medical industry, family, love, war and wedding-planning – from an electrically entertaining new voice Meet Veblen: a passionate defender of the anti-consumerist views of her name-sake, the iconoclastic economist Thorstein Veblen. She’s an experienced cheerer-upper (mainly of her narcissistic, hypochondriac, controlling mother), an amateur translator of Norwegian, and a firm believer in the distinct possibility that the plucky grey squirrel following her around can understand more than it lets on. Meet her fiance, Paul: the son of good hippies who were bad parents, a no-nonsense, high-flying neuroscientist with no time for squirrels. His recent work on a device to minimize battlefield trauma has led him dangerously close to the seductive Cloris Hutmacher, heiress to a pharmaceuticals empire, who is promising him fame and fortune through a shady-sounding deal with the Department of Defence. What could possibly go wrong?

Ruby av Cynthia Bond – Ephram Jennings has never forgotten the beautiful girl with the long braids running through the piney woods of Liberty, their small East Texas town. Young Ruby Bell, «the kind of pretty it hurt to look at,» has suffered beyond imagining, so as soon as she can, she flees suffocating Liberty for the bright pull of 1950s New York. Ruby quickly winds her way into the ripe center of the city-the darkened piano bars and hidden alleyways of the Village-all the while hoping for a glimpse of the red hair and green eyes of her mother. When a telegram from her cousin forces her to return home, thirty-year-old Ruby finds herself reliving the devastating violence of her girlhood. With the terrifying realization that she might not be strong enough to fight her way back out again, Ruby struggles to survive her memories of the town’s dark past. Meanwhile, Ephram must choose between loyalty to the sister who raised him and the chance for a life with the woman he has loved since he was a boy.

The glorious heresies av Liza McInerney – Denne er på langlisten til 3 ulike priser nå i år, og det er debutboken til denne irske forfatteren.
He was definitely dead, whoever he was. He wore a once-black jumper and a pair of shiny tracksuit bottoms. The back of his head was cracked and his hair matted, but it had been foxy before that. A tall man, a skinny rake, another string of piss, now departed. She hadn’t gotten a look at his face before she flaked him with the Holy Stone and she couldn’t bring herself to turn him over.’ One messy murder affects the lives of five misfits who exist on the fringes of Ireland’s post-crash society. Ryan is a fifteen-year-old drug dealer desperate not to turn out like his alcoholic father Tony, whose obsession with his unhinged next-door neighbour threatens to ruin him and his family. Georgie is a prostitute whose willingness to feign a religious conversion has dangerous repercussions, while Maureen, the accidental murderer, has returned to Cork after forty years in exile to discover that Jimmy, the son she was forced to give up years before, has grown into the most fearsome gangster in the city. In seeking atonement for the murder and a multitude of other perceived sins, Maureen threatens to destroy everything her son has worked so hard for, while her actions risk bringing the intertwined lives of the Irish underworld into the spotlight …

Har sett meg ut noen titler jeg kunne tenke meg å lese, men usikker på hvor mange det blir.

Vinneren presenteres mandag 8 juni.

HILSEN BEATHE