Tale of addiction and recovery on a remote Scottish island shortlisted for £10,000 book prize
The Outrun by Amy Liptrot (Canongate), a memoir of addiction and recovery and the part played in the latter by the natural world on Orkney, has been short-listed today for the £10,000 RSL Ondaatje Prize, an award for “a distinguished work of fiction, non-fiction or poetry evoking the spirit of a place”. The book has already won Liptrot the Wainwright Prize, for nature/travel writing focused on Britain, and was short-listed for last year’s Wellcome Prize for works engaging with medicine, health or illness.
Last year’s Ondaatje Prize short list was unusual in that it included a poetry collection — for the first time in seven years — and had no novels. This year, The Outrun aside, all the books are fiction.
The Gustav Sonata by Rose Tremain (Chatto & Windus), her 13th novel and one acclaimed by many critics as among her best, is set in Switzerland. It’s a book about friendship and longing and how the lives of two men are sculpted by decisions their parents made at the time of the Second World War.
In In A Land of Paper Gods, Rebecca Mackenzie (Tinder Press), who is herself the daughter of missionaries and grew up in 1980s Bangkok, tells the story of Henrietta, a child at a mountain-top boarding school for the children of British missionaries in China, in the run-up to the Sino-Japanese War.
Religion figures, too, in Augustown by Kei Miller (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), which features a flying preacher-man. Set in a fictional valley that shares a parallel history with the real August Town, Jamaica, it tells how a self-important schoolteacher cuts off a boy’s dreadlocks in his classroom and sparks what the locals call “autoclaps” — calamity.
Five rivers run into one another to the south of the cathedral city of Salisbury. In Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain, Barney Norris (Doubleday) shows how five people, living very different lives, become similarly entwined as the result of a car crash. It’s a story in which the playwright finds drama in everyday life.
Golden Hill by Francis Spufford (Faber & Faber), set in colonial New York, is a picaresque story of a young Londoner attempting to make his way in the city, and a celebration of the 18th-century novel as shaped by Smollett, Sterne, and Henry and Sarah Fielding.
Now in its 14th year, the Ondaatje Prize of the Royal Society of Literature is sponsored by Sir Christopher Ondaatje, the businessman, adventurer and writer. Last year’s winner was Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible, by Peter Pomerantsev, an electrifying portrait of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Extracts from this year's short-listed titles will appear in Telegraph Travel this weekend. The winner will be announced on May 8.
