The 2017 shortlist

Celeste Ng is the author of the novel Everything I Never Told You (Blackfriars/Little, Brown UK), which was a New York Times bestseller, a New York Times Notable Book of 2014, Amazon’s number 1 Best Book of 2014, and was named a best book of the year by over a dozen U.S. publications. Everything I Never Told You was also the winner of the Massachusetts Book Award, the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, and the American Library Association’s Alex Award, and has been translated into over twenty languages. Celeste has also been awarded the Pushcart Prize, the Hopwood Award, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her second novel, Little Fires Everywhere, will be published in September 2017 by Little, Brown UK. Celeste grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Shaker Heights, Ohio, in a family of scientists. She has taught writing at the University of Michigan and Grub Street in Boston and currently lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her husband and son.

American writer Bret Anthony-Johnston is the author of the internationally bestselling novel Remember Me Like This, which was featured on BBC4’s Books at Bedtime series, was named a Notable Book of the Year by The New York Times Book Review, and is being made into a major motion picture. He also wrote the multi-award-winning short story collection Corpus Christi: Stories, which was named a Best Book of the Year by The Independent and The Irish Times, and was shortlisted for Ireland’s Frank O’Connor International Short Fiction Prize. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he has received awards from the Natinal Endowment for the Arts, the National Book Foundation, the Pushcart Prize, the Virginia Quarterly Review and elsewhere. His work has appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, Esquire, Glimmer Train Stories, The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, American Short Fiction and The Atlantic. He wrote the documentary Waiting for Lightning, which was released in theatres around the world, and he is the Director of Creative Writing at Harvard University. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Sally Rooney was born in the west of Ireland in 1991. She lives and works in Dublin, where she graduated from Trinity College with a BA in English Literature and an MPhil in Literatures of the Americas. Her work has appeared in Granta, The White Review, The Dublin Review, Winter Papers and The Stinging Fly. Her debut novel, Conversations with Friends, is forthcoming in twelve territories worldwide, and will be published by Faber & Faber in June 2017.

Born in 1988 and raised by two journalists, American writer Kathleen Alcott is the author of the novels The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets and Infinite Home, the first of which was published in the United States when she was twenty-three. Infinite Home, released in 2015, was nominated for The Kirkus Prize and shortlisted for The Chautuaqua Prize. Her journalism has appeared in outlets including The Guardian, The New York Times, and The New Yorker, and her short fiction has been listed as notable by The Best American Short Stories. A native of Northern California, she divides her time between there and New York City, where she serves as an adjunct professor at Columbia University.

British writer Richard Lambert is a poet and novelist, and a graduate of the MA in Creative Writing at UEA. His poetry collection Night Journey was published in 2012 and he is the recipient of an Arts Council award to write a new collection, The Nameless Places. Individual poems have appeared in The Spectator, the TLS, Poetry Review, Poetry Ireland Review, PN Review, The Rialto, and The Forward Anthology 2014. His novel The Wolf Road was longlisted for this year’s Caledonia Novel Award for unpublished debut novelists and he is currently on Escalator, a talent development scheme for writers in the east of England. He has a PhD in history about descriptions of landscape in medieval France, and has worked in higher education, local government, and the NHS. He lives in Norwich.

Victor Lodato was born in New Jersey. His novel, Mathilda Savitch (2009), was hailed by The New York Times as “a Salingeresque wonder of a first novel” and was a “Best Book of the Year” in The Christian Science Monitor, Booklist, and The Globe and Mail. The novel won the PEN USA Award for Fiction and the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize, and has been published in sixteen countries, including the UK (Fourth Estate). Victor is a Guggenheim Fellow, as well as the recipient of fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts, The Camargo Foundation (France), and The Bogliasco Foundation (Italy). His short fiction and essays have been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Granta, and Best American Short Stories. His new novel, Edgar and Lucy, will be published in March 2017. Victor currently divides his time between Tucson, Arizona and Ashland, Oregon.