The Barbellion Prize 2022 Longlist
This is the third year that the Barbellion Prize will be awarded “to an author whose work has best represented the experience of chronic illness and/or disability.” In the inaugural year I read the entire shortlist, and last year I had already read a few from the longlist and was able to review another two shortlisted titles before the prize announcement.
The 2022 longlist was announced on Friday and contains two books I’d predicted – Hybrid Humans, which I reviewed earlier in the year; and Polluted Sex – and one more that I’d heard of (Chouette), while the rest were new to me. Letty McHugh kindly sent me a PDF copy of her self-published memoir in poems, Book of Hours, and I may be able to get some of the others from the publishers to support the prize through reviews early in the new year.
This list comes from the Prize website. Click on any title for more information. Here we have three (hybrid) memoirs, two autobiographical poetry collections, a novel, a book of short stories, and a biography. Will it be the year for a poetry collection or biography to win?
Head Above Water by Shahd Alshammari (Neem Tree Press)
From the synopsis: “takes us into a space of intimate conversations on illness and society’s stigmatization of disabled bodies. We are invited in to ask the big questions about life, loss, and the place of the other. … Through conversations about women’s identities, bodies, and our journeys through life, we arrive at a politics of love, survival, and hope.”
Recovering Dorothy: The Hidden Life of Dorothy Wordsworth by Polly Atkin (Saraband)
From the synopsis: “Less well known [than her writing and famous brother] … is that Dorothy became seriously ill … and was mostly housebound for the last 20 years of her life. Her personal letters and unpublished journals from this time … [show] a compassionate and creative woman who made her sickroom into a garden … and … grew to call herself a poet.”
Polluted Sex by Lauren Foley (Influx Press)
From the synopsis: “A pregnant woman takes the ferry to the UK. … Two ungendered characters contest the same female body. … Lauren Foley’s debut collection of dramatic short stories … is fearless in its depiction of women’s bodies and sexuality, offering an unflinching window into Irish girl and womanhood.”
163 Days by Hannah Hodgson (Seren Books)
From the synopsis: “Hodgson is an award-winning poet and a palliative care patient. In her compelling debut collection … she uses a panoply of medical, legal, and personal vocabularies to explore what illness, death and dying does to a person as both patient and witness. 163 days is the length of Hannah’s longest period of hospitalisation to date.”
From the synopsis: “Over the course of the pandemic, a complication with my chronic illness left me alone in a darkened room for three weeks. I drew comfort from an imagined Book of Hours. … Book of Hours is a collection of lyric essay and poetry exploring what it means to have faith, why we chase suffering and how to take solace in small joys.”
Chouette by Claire Oshetsky (Ecco/HarperCollins)
From the synopsis: “When Chouette is born small and broken-winged, Tiny … [is left] on her own to care for a child who seems more predatory bird than baby. … When she discovers that her husband is on an obsessive and increasingly dangerous quest to find a “cure” for their daughter, Tiny must decide whether Chouette should be raised to fit in or to be herself”.
My blog review excerpt: “Parker was a captain in the British Army in Afghanistan when an IED took his legs. Now he wears prostheses that make him roughly 12% machine. Pain management, PTSD, phantom limbs, foreign body rejection, and deep brain stimulation are other topics in this wide-ranging study that is at the juncture of the personal and political.”
Year of The Tiger: An Activist’s Life by Alice Wong (Vintage Books/PRH)
From the synopsis: “[With] original essays, previously published work, conversations, graphics, photos, commissioned art by disabled and Asian American artists, and more, Alice uses her unique talent to share an impressionistic scrapbook of her life as an Asian American disabled activist, community organizer, media maker, and dreamer.”
This year’s judges are Dr Emmeline Burdett, Lynn Buckle (last year’s winner) and scholar Ray Davis. The shortlist is due out in January and the winner will be announced in February.
Do any of these nominees appeal to you?
The Barbellion Prize 2020 Winner
It has been a pleasure following the Barbellion Prize race this year. In case you haven’t already seen the news, the winner of the inaugural award is Golem Girl by Riva Lehrer (my review).
It’s not often that my favourite from a literary prize list is also the judges’ pick, so I’m particularly pleased that my prediction came true. The full announcement is here. Here’s what two of the judges had to say:
Assistant Professor of Literature Dr Shahd Alshammari: “Golem Girl is a memoir that is infused with art, life, discrimination, love, self-love, and what it means to be vulnerable. Disability is on every page—and that is the type of literature we need.”
Cat Mitchell, Lecturer and Programme Leader of the Writing and Publishing degree at the University of Derby: “Golem Girl is a powerful and wide-reaching account of a life lived with disability. By interweaving her writing and art, Riva explores queerness, community, society’s fear of difference, and the often problematic representation of disabled bodies in art and medicine.”
Professor Tom Shakespeare FBA, Professor of Disability Research at London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and an advisor to the Prize, added: “From Pope to Stevenson, Woolf to Plath, writers have lived with illness and disability for centuries. Now here comes exactly the right prize at the right time: disabled writers have been locked down far longer, and deserve far more recognition than they get. The Barbellion Prize deserves to succeed, and Riva Lehrer’s Golem Girl will put it on the map.”
To recap, the other three on the shortlist were:
- The Fragments of My Father by Sam Mills
- Sanatorium by Abi Palmer
- Kika & Me by Dr Amit Patel
It’s been quite the whirlwind reading and reviewing all four books as the first two review copies only arrived on the 28th of January. Most of my reviews got bunched up right in the 36 or so hours before the announcement, but I was relieved that I managed to get them all up in advance. The Prize basically has no budget, so when I approached Cat (who used to work in publicity at Penguin) and asked if I and a handful of other bloggers could get involved, I wasn’t sure if it would be a possibility. I was really grateful to the four publishers for being willing to supply review copies. I hope we have helped to get the word out there.
The Barbellion Prize is already accepting entries for the 2021 award (submissions close on 31 October; see the website for more information). On my wish list thus far are two excellent memoirs, Sanctuary by Emily Rapp Black, who has a prosthetic leg and lost her son to Tay-Sachs disease, and A Still Life by Josie George, who lives joyfully with chronic illness.
Other relevant 2021 releases I’m interested in getting hold of are: The Invention of Miracles: language, power, and Alexander Graham Bell’s quest to end deafness by Katie Booth, Places I’ve Taken My Body by Molly McCully Brown, What Doesn’t Kill You: A Life with Chronic Illness – Lessons from a Body in Revolt by Tessa Miller, and Waiting for Superman: One Family’s Struggle to Survive – and Cure – Chronic Fatigue Syndrome by Tracie White.
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 