Women’s prize for fiction shortlist entirely first-time nominees

Susanna Clarke, Yaa Gyasi and Patricia Lockwood among the six authors up for the £30,000 award

This year’s shortlist for the Women’s prize for fiction is made up of authors who have never been nominated for the award before, with Yaa Gyasi, Susanna Clarke and Patricia Lockwood among those competing for £30,000.

The annual award for an “outstanding, ambitious, original” novel by a woman features several stories about “lives you haven’t read about before”, said chair of judges Bernardine Evaristo, the Booker prize-winning novelist. These include Claire Fuller’s fourth novel Unsettled Ground, about middle-aged twins who have grown up in isolation in rural Wiltshire, and Cherie Jones’ debut How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House, a story of murder, abuse and violence that takes place in a community on Barbados. These sit beside Gyasi’s second novel Transcendent Kingdom, following a family of Ghanaian immigrants living in the American south.

Related: Yaa Gyasi: 'Toni Morrison blew away everything I thought I knew about literature'

Related: Patricia Lockwood: 'That's what's so attractive about the internet: you can exist there as a spirit in the void’

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