The Desmond Elliot Prize 2020 Shortlist
Posted by the Bookshop
The Desmond Elliott Prize celebrates the best in debut fiction. From Nikita Lalwani’s win in its inaugral year, through Eimear McBride’s A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing, to last year’s winner, and shop favourite, We That Are Young by Preti Taneja, the prize has an brilliant record of bringing new talent to wider attention.
The shortlist for this year’s prize was announced yesterday: Abi Daré’s The Girl With the Louding Voice, That Reminds Me by Derek Owusu and The Private Joys of Nnenna Maloney by Okechukwu Nzelu. Preti Taneja, who chairs this year’s judging panel, said of the shortlist:
We have selected three extraordinary voices unafraid to tackle, with fresh narrative form and linguistic verve, the big, intimate themes we all face: family, sexuality, trauma, empire, race, migration and, of course, love.
You can read more about the shortlist – probably the first ever all black shortlist for a mainstream UK literary prize – in Preti’s Guardian blog here. The winner will be announced on Thursday 2 July.
