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Louise Erdrich, Elif Shafak and debut novelist Lisa Allen-Agostini are among the contenders offering an ‘escape’ from global crisesSix countries are represented on this year’s Women’s prize for fiction shortlist, with Meg Mason and Elif Shafak among those in the running for the £30,000 prize. The New Zealander and the Turkish-British author are up against two Americans, one American-Canadian and a Trinidadian debut novelist. The annual prize aims to honour “outstanding, ambitious, original fiction written in English by women from anywhere in the world”, and this year’s chair of judges, Mary Ann Sieghart, was pleased by how “wonderfully diverse” the shortlist has turned out to be. But there were no tick-box exercises in the judging meetings, she stressed: “They were the books we most loved. It really is as simple as that.” Continue reading...