2024 Women’s Prize for Fiction: Quick reviews of the six shortlisted novels

The Women’s Prize for Fiction has been championing women writers since it launched in 1996. It is one of the most influential and popular literary prizes in world with writers like Zadie Smith and Andrea Levy, among its past winners.

Its 2024 shortlist is a testament to the diversity of stories being told by women around the world. Here, our academics review the six shortlisted books ahead of the announcement of the winner on June 13.

Brotherless Night, VV Ganeshananthan

This is an unforgettable novel of formation – an awakening from tribal loyalties into new possibilities of identity and agency – set in Jaffna, Sri Lanka, during the civil war (1983 to 2009). The protagonist, Sashikala Kulenthiren, is a Tamil teenager, walking apace with her brothers toward medical or engineering degrees, and elaborations of a future peaceful with books, dialogue, and organic living.

When the government atrocities and the call of militancy start disappearing boy after boy from the peninsula, Sashi is reduced to a bit-player of history. She becomes discombobulated by grief for fallen or embattled brothers. However, she finds strength and survives with a women’s collective which agitates, organises and treats hypermasculinity, instead of serving it.

Ganeshananthan anatomises a separatist movement without once glorifying its concerted violence. The book...

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