Folio prize reveals 80 titles in contention for 2015 award

Martin Amis’s love story set in a concentration camp, The Zone of Interest, David Mitchell’s fantastical The Bone Clocks, and Ali Smith’s mould-breaking How to be Both are just three of the books on an 80-strong list of nominations for this year’s Folio prize.

Open to English-language fiction from around the world, the line-up, announced on Sunday, pits some of international literature’s best-known names against each other, with Americans Lorrie Moore, Jane Smiley and Dave Eggers up against Australians Peter Carey, Tim Winton and Richard Flanagan, and Britain’s Helen Dunmore, Will Self, Edward St Aubyn and Sarah Waters.

Canada’s Margaret Atwood is nominated for her short story collection Stone Mattress, Pakistan-born Kamila Shamsie for her story of a Pashtun soldier in the first world war, A God in Every Stone, and Ireland’s Colm Tóibín for Nora Webster.

Major names from Jonathan Lethem to Richard Powers compete with lesser-known writers on the list, with Sarah Perry picked by the academy for her debut novel After Me Comes the Flood, and Paul Kingsnorth for his crowd-funded, Booker-longlisted novel The Wake. Genre also gets a good showing, with James Ellroy’s crime novel Perfidia nominated by judges, alongside Jeff VanderMeer’s slice of eerie science fiction Annihilation. One major name to be overlooked is Ian McEwan, whose latest novel The Children Act is not in the running for the award.

The Folio prize sets out to “to identify works of fiction in which the story being told and the subjects being explored achieve their most perfect and thrilling expression”, with the 235 members of the Folio prize academy, a mix of international critics and writers, nominating 60 titles for judges’ consideration this year. A further 20 – which were not identified by organisers – were called in by judges.

William Fiennes, who chairs this year’s judging panel, called the list of nominations “both daunting and exhilarating”.

“It’s not just that the list has such range and richness. Reading the books, it’s as if we’re eavesdropping on a marvellous conversation about what a novel is and might be,” he said.

Fiennes and his fellow judges, the writers Rachel Cooke, Mohsin Hamid, AM Homes and Deborah Levy, will now select a shortlist of eight titles, which will be announced on 9 February. The winner, joining inaugural victor George Saunders, who won this year for his collection of short stories Tenth of December, will be announced on 23 March.

The 80 books nominated by The Folio Prize Academy this year are:
10:04, Ben Lerner (Granta)
A GOD IN EVERY STONE, Kamila Shamsie (Bloomsbury Publishing)
ACADEMY STREET, Mary Costello (Canongate)
AFTER ME COMES THE FLOOD, Sarah Perry (Serpent’s Tail)
ALL MY PUNY SORROWS, Miriam Toews (Faber & Faber)
ALL OUR NAMES, Dinaw Mengitsu (Sceptre)
ALL THE DAYS AND NIGHTS, Niven Goviden (The Friday Project)
ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE, Anthony Doerr (4th Estate)
ALL THE RAGE, AL Kennedy (Jonathan Cape)
AMNESIA, Peter Carey (Faber & Faber)
ANNIHILATION, Jeff VanderMeer (4th Estate)
ARCTIC SUMMER, Damon Galgut (Atlantic Books)
BALD NEW WORLD, Peter Tieryas Liu (John Hunt Publishing)
BARK, Lorrie Moore (Faber & Faber)
BE SAFE I LOVE YOU, Cara Hoffman (Virago)
BOY, SNOW, BIRD, Helen Oyeyemi (Picador)
CAN’T AND WON’T, Lydia Davis (Hamish Hamilton)
DEAR THIEF, Samantha Harvey (Jonathan Cape)
DEPT. OF SPECULATION, Jenny Offill (Granta)
DISSIDENT GARDENS, Jonathan Lethem (Jonathan Cape)
DUST, Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor (Granta)
EM AND THE BIG HOOM, Jerry Pinto (Viking)
ENGLAND AND OTHER STORIES, Graham Swift (Simon & Schuster)
EUPHORIA, Lily King (Picador)
EVERLAND, Rebecca Hunt (Fig Tree)
EYRIE, Tim Winton (Picador)
FAMILY LIFE, Akhil Sharma (Faber & Faber)
FOURTH OF JULY CREEK, Smith Henderson (William Heinemann)
HOW TO BE BOTH, Ali Smith (Hamish Hamilton)
IN SEARCH OF SILENCE, Emily Mackie (Sceptre)
IN THE APPROACHES, Nicola Barker (4th Estate)
IN THE LIGHT OF WHAT WE KNOW, Zia Haider Rahman (Picador)
J, Howard Jacobson (Jonathan Cape)
KINDER THAN SOLITUDE, Yiyun Li (4th Estate)
LILA, Marilynne Robinson (Virago)
LIFE DRAWING, Robin Black (Picador)
LOST FOR WORDS, Edward St Aubyn (Picador)
LOVE AND TREASURE, Ayelet Waldman (Two Roads)
NORA WEBSTER, Colm Tóibín (Viking)
ON SUCH A FULL SEA, Chang-Rae Lee (Little, Brown)
ORFEO, Richard Powers (Atlantic Books)
OUTLINE, Rachel Cusk (Faber & Faber)
PERFIDIA, James Ellroy (William Heinemann)
ROAD ENDS, Mary Lawson (Chatto & Windus)
SHARK, Will Self (Viking)
SOME LUCK, Jane Smiley (Mantle)
STAY UP WITH ME, Tom Barbash (Simon & Schuster)
STONE MATTRESS, Margaret Atwood (Bloomsbury Publishing)
THE BALLAD OF A SMALL PLAYER, Lawrence Osborne (The Hogarth Press)
THE BONE CLOCKS, David Mitchell (Sceptre)
THE BOOK OF GOLD LEAVES, Mirza Waheed (Penguin)
THE BOOK OF STRANGE NEW THINGS, Michel Faber (Canongate)
THE COUNTRY OF ICECREAM STAR, Sandra Newman (Chatto & Windus)
THE DOG, Joseph O’Neill (4th Estate)
THE FEVER, Megan Abbott (Picador)
THE HEROES’ WELCOME, Louisa Young (Harper Collins)
THE INCARNATIONS, Susan Barker (Doubleday)
THE LIE, Helen Dunmore (Hutchinson)
THE LIVES OF OTHERS, Neel Mukherjee (Chatto & Windus)
THE NARROW ROAD TO THE DEEP NORTH, Richard Flanagan (Chatto & Windus)
THE NIGHT GUEST, Fiona McFarlane (Sceptre)
THE PAYING GUESTS, Sarah Waters (Virago)
THE TELL-TALE HEART, Jill Dawson (Sceptre)
THE TEMPORARY GENTLEMAN, Sebastain Barry (Faber & Faber)
THE WAKE, Paul Kingsnorth (Unbound)
THE ZONE OF INTEREST, Martin Amis (Jonathan Cape)
THEIR LIPS TALK OF MISCHIEF, Alan Warner (Faber & Faber)
THUNDERSTRUCK, Elizabeth McCracken (Jonthan Cape)
TO RISE AGAIN AT A DECENT HOUR, Joshua Ferris (Viking)
TRAVELLING SPRINKLER, Nicholson Baker (Serpent’s Tail)
UPSTAIRS AT THE PARTY, Linda Grant (Virago)
VIPER WINE, Hermione Eyre (Jonathan Cape)
VIRGINIA WOOLF IN MANHATTAN, Maggie Gee (Telegram Books)
WE ARE NOT OURSELVES, Thomas Matthew (4th Estate)
WHAT YOU WANT, Constantine Phipps (Quercus)
WITTGENSTEIN JR, Lars Iyer (Melville House)
YOUNG SKINS, Colin Barrett (Jonathan Cape)
YOUR FATHERS, WHERE ARE THEY?..., Dave Eggers (Hamish Hamilton)