Jury chair Uli Lenart today announced the dozen titles on the Green Carnation Prize longlist, including the Orange Women's Prize winner and three titles longlisted for the Man Booker. In its debut year, the Green Carnation Prize was exclusively for gay men; since then it has broadened its scope to include all LGBT authors. This means that writers who identify as gay but virtually never write about gay life are honored, while this year's wonderful novel about a fifty-year gay relationship between rich black Londoners of Caribbean ancestry -- characters seen far too rarely in contemporary literature -- Mr Loverman is ineligible because Bernardine Evaristo is straight.
In amplifying the Green Carnation's four criteria of originality, excellence, reabadility, and resonance, the prize's site goes on to say, "I suppose the pink elephant in the room is the fact that the Green Carnation is a prize that specifically celebrates the work of LGBT writers. Would it not make sense therefore to look for something quintessentially queer? Even if that quality does exist, the Green Carnation is not a prize for writing with just LGBT content or themes. It is a prize that celebrates the incredible contribution of LGBT people to our (everyone’s) collective treasure-trove of excellent writing. That said, work by LGBT writers could be argued to share a certain sensibility, a certain quality, an independence of perspective or sensitivity, perhaps. It isn’t really good to generalise, but – much like judging, we all do it a bit, don’t we?"
The 2013 longlist:
Chris Adrian, Gob's Grief, novel of Civil War and machine to bring back the dead
Tash Aw, Five Star Billionaire, novel of four characters in Shanghai
Damian Barr, Maggie and Me
, memoir of growing up gay in 80s Britain
Maureen Duffy, Environmental Studies, poetry
Patrick Flannery, Fallen Land
, novel of two midwestern families by author of Absolution
Niven Govinden, Black Bread White Beer
, novella, mixed straight couple after miscarriage
Philip Hoare, The Sea Inside, nonfiction nature writing
A. M. Homes, May We Be Forgiven
, novel of adult brothers at odds in Cheever's suburbia
Richard House, The Kills
, thousand-page contemporary novel spanning many countries
Neil McKenna, Fanny and Stella, biography of two London men dressing as women in 1870
Charlotte Mendelson, Almost English
, novel of Hungarian family in London in the 80s
Andrew Solomon, Far From the Tree
, nonfiction about vertical and horizontal identity
The shortlist will be announced November 5 and the winner revealed on November 16. Last year the judges declared a tie between Patrick Gale's A Perfectly Good Man
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