English writer Susanna Clarke wins $51K Women's Prize for Fiction for novel Piranesi
Vicky Qiao | | Posted: September 8, 2021 9:09 PM | Last Updated: September 8, 2021
Piranesi, the second novel by Susanna Clarke, has won the 2021 Women's Prize for Fiction.
The £30,000 ($51,543.15 Cdn) prize recognizes the year's best novel written by a woman in English. Writers from around the world are eligible.
Piranesi is a fantasy novel where the protagonist, Piranesi, lives in a building of infinite rooms, endless corridors and thousands of statues lining the walls. A man called The Other visits Piranesi twice a week and asks for help with research into A Great and Secret Knowledge. But as Piranesi explores, a terrible truth begins to unravel.
Clarke is an English author known for her debut novel Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, which won a Hugo award. She was an editor at Simon and Schuster, and published seven short stories and novellas in American anthologies. Clarke lives in Cambridge.
"I'm dazed and slightly shaky and I can't quite believe it," Clarke told the Women's Prize after her win. "It does feel exactly like a dream."
"The Women's Prize is and will continue to be important simple because women have such marvellous, varied and imaginative and wonderful stories to tell, and people want to hear them."
"With her first novel in 17 years, Susanna Clarke has given us a truly original, unexpected flight of fancy which melds genres and challenges preconceptions about what books should be," said jury chair Bernardine Evaristo in a press statement.
"She has created a world beyond our wildest imagination that also tells us something profound about what it is to be human."
The prize was announced during the awards ceremony in Bedford Square Gardens, London, hosted by novelist and Women's Prize founder director, Kate Mosse.
The Women's Prize for Fiction is established by Women's Prize Trust, a registered charity championing women writers on a global stage.
Last year's winner was Irish writer Maggie O'Farrell for her novel Hamnet, published as Hamnet & Judith in Canada.
Past Canadian winners include Toronto's Anne Michaels for her 1996 novel Fugitive Pieces and Winnipeg's Carol Shields for her 1997 novel Larry's Party.