Roll Up, Roll Up, It’s The Baileys Women’s Prize For Fiction 2015 Longlist

It's that time again... A new crop of writers have been announced as the longlist in the running for the Baileys Women's Prize For Fiction.

Judged by director of Liberty and panel chair person Shami Chakrabarti, writer and founder of The Everyday Sexism Project, Laura Bates, columnist and broadcaster Grace Dent, novelist and poet Helen Dunmore, and Channel 4 News presenter Cathy Newman, the 20 were hand-picked from 165 books written between 1 April 2014 and 31 March 2015 available for consideration.

In the line-up are five debut novels and one writer who is on to her 20th book. In this, its 20th year, the prize continues to celebrate the amazing work of female writers across fiction written in English, regardless of the writer's origins across the globe.

**The Baileys Women's Prize For Fiction Longlist **

Rachel Cusk, Outline (Faber and Faber)

Lissa Evans, Crooked Heart (Doubleday)

Xiaolu Guo, I Am China (Chatto & Windus)

Samantha Harvey, Dear Thief (Jonathan Cape)

Emma Healey, Elizabeth is Missing (Viking)

Patricia Ferguson, Aren’t We Sisters? (Penguin Books)

Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven (Picador)

Grace McCleen, The Offering (Sceptre)

Sandra Newman, The Country of Ice Cream Star (Chatto & Windus)

Heather O’Neill, The Girl Who Was Saturday Night (Quercus)

Laline Paull, The Bees (Fourth Estate)

Marie Phillips, The Table of Less Valued Knights (Jonathan Cape)

Rachel Seiffert, The Walk Home (Virago)

Kamila Shamsie, A God in Every Stone (Bloomsbury)

Ali Smith, How to be Both (Hamish Hamilton)

Sara Taylor, The Shore (William Heinemann)

Anne Tyler, A Spool of Blue Thread (Chatto & Windus)

Sarah Waters, The Paying Guests (Virago)

Jemma Wayne, After Before (Legend Press)

PP Wong, The Life of a Banana (Legend Press)

The announcement of the shortlist for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction will take place on April 13, and the announcement of the winner of the prestigious Bessie bronze statue and £30,000 cheque happens on June 3 at the Royal Festival Hall. Stay tuned for more details...