British author Ali Smith has won the 2015 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction with her sixth novel How to Be Both.
“Ancient and modern meet and speak to each other in this tender, brilliant and witty novel of grief, love, sexuality and shape-shifting identity.”
Shami Chakrabarti, Chair of Judges
How to Be Both is a novel all about art’s versatility. Borrowing from painting’s fresco technique to make an original literary double-take, it’s a fast-moving genre-bending conversation between forms, times, truths and fictions. There’s a renaissance artist of the 1460s. There’s the child of a child of the 1960s. Two tales of love and injustice twist into a singular yarn where time gets timeless, structural gets playful, knowing gets mysterious, fictional gets real – and all life’s givens get given a second chance.
The winning title was also chosen by the Shadow Jury, who made their announcement yesterday, see some of their reviews here:
How To Be Both
– reviewed by Eric at The Lonesome Reader
– reviewed by Naomi at The Writes of Women
Word by Word 
I’m looking forward to reading this.
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I’m thrilled! I love Ali Smith and really enjoyed How To Be Both. It’s a stunning, innovative novel.
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So nice to know that Ali Smith finally won an award. It was long overdue. After being repeatedly short / long listed for the Booker prize, so happy to see her finally win a wonderful prize. Congratulations Ali!
And thanks for all your informative posts, Claire! I don’t follow the official news and I get all my literary news from your blog 🙂 I don’t know what I would do without your posts.
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So nice to hear from you Vishy, I have been struggling to keep up with everything and have missed your cheerful and encouraging comments. I hope all is well in your reading world.
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I’ve just finished this and WOW its brilliant. I need to take some time over writing my review because its left me with so much to think about!
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Wow, that’s high praise indeed, can’t wait to discover it too and to read your review!
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Funny I’m not surprised Ali Smith won. I had Smith or Tyler pegged for the winner. Have you heard anything about Outline? i hope to read al the others on the shortlist.
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It’s probablt the one I’ve heard the least about, I recall Eric’s review at lonsomereader and he is always objective in his summations, it didn’t make me wish to read the book. I read her journalism ocassionally, she’s quite a controversial author, especially when its nonficiton.
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I can’t say I have an opinion on Smith at all since I’ve not read any of he stuff. Who knows maybe this summer…..
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