Three Nigerian female authors, Oyinkan Braithwaite, Akwaeke Emezi and Diana Evans, have been nominated for the 2019 Women’s Prize for Fiction.
The award was previously known as the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction.
Braithwaite was nominated for her book My Sister, The Serial Killer.
Emezi got the nod for her book Freshwater while Evans for Ordinary People.
The book My Sister, The Serial Killer captures a complex relationship between a glamorous Lagos fashion designer and her responsible older sister, who’s always ready with bleach and rubber gloves to help cover up a crime.
Emezi’s book Freshwater look at the multiple voices of an Igbo god living within a young woman; with the use of Igbo cosmology to reveal their experience as a trans African.
Lastly, Ordinary People features the melancholy of suburban middle-class black people using celebrity events. The book opens at a party thrown in honor of Barack Obama’s presidential victory in 2008.
Chimamanda Adichie won the award in 2007 for Half of a Yellow Sun.
The award comes with a £30,000 ($40,000) prize.
It was created in 1996 after the Bookers Prize of 1991 where none of the six shortlisted books was by a woman, despite 60 per cent of novels that year being published by female authors.
