Summary Shamsie has been shortlisted for the Women’s prize twice before. Photo: Twitter
(Web Desk) – British Pakistani author Kamila Shamsie’s seventh novel titled Home Fire has won the prestigious Women’s Prize for Fiction for 2018.
Chair of the judges Sarah Sands said the panel “chose the book which we felt spoke for our times.” Home Fire, she said, is about identity, conflicting loyalties, love and politics.
Sands announced Home Fire as the winner of the £30,000 award.
Watch the moment that kamilashamsie won the 2018 WomensPrize for Fiction pic.twitter.com/7WB9zifD6O
— Womens Prize (WomensPrize) June 6, 2018
“The Women’s Prize for Fiction has such power that I know when I was first short-listed it just changed my life as a writer,” said Shamsie following the announcement of the prize.
“People were just reading the books more…that’s what you want as a writer.”
Shamsie said that this shortlist was one of the successful ways of getting the books into the hands of readers.
Speaking about Home Fire she said it is a story of five British Muslims and is based on the ancient tale Antigone.
“I wanted to tell a story that was very much of the moment but also one that told us we are not living in a moment unlike any other… that human beings keep living the same stories and we can learn from them.”
The novel follows three orphaned children of a Jihadi, and the son of the British Muslim home secretary who goes one to meet one of the daughters of the Jihadi.
Drumroll please Were thrilled to announce that the 2018 WomensPrize winner is Kamila Shamsie with Home Fire pic.twitter.com/BklJ5LSNS2
— Womens Prize (@WomensPrize) June 6, 2018
Shamsie won the award beating a shortlist that included US author Jesmyn Ward’s novel Sing, Unburied, Sing, for which she won the National Book Award, and Imogen Hermes Gowar’s debut, The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock.
Home Fire was longlisted for the 2017 Man Booker prize and shortlisted for the Costa novel award.
Shamsie has been shortlisted for the Women’s prize twice before. In 2015, The Guardian reported that Shamsie “slammed the gender bias she saw in the books world and called for a dedicated year of publishing only women in order to redress the inequality.”
About the book, The New York Times writes: “Ingenious and love-struck … Home Fire takes flight. … Shamsie drives this gleaming machine home in a manner that, if I weren’t handling airplane metaphors, I would call smashing. … Builds to one of the most memorable final scenes I’ve read in a novel this century.”
The Washington Post has termed it a “haunting novel, full of dazzling moments and not a few surprising turns."
For more on this, watch a report by Dunya News below.
