RSL Ondaatje Prize 2022 Longlist Announced

The Royal Society of Literature (RSL), the voice for the value of literature in the UK, has today unveiled the longlist for the 2022 RSL Ondaatje Prize. An annual prize of £10,000, the RSL Ondaatje Prize is awarded by the RSL to an outstanding work of fiction, non-fiction or poetry that best evokes the spirit of a place.

Twenty authors make up this year's longlist, chosen by judges Patrice Lawrence, Chair Sandeep Parmar and Philippe Sands.

The 2022 RSL Ondaatje Longlist is:

Hester Barron & Claire Langhamer, Class of '37 (John Blake)

Polly Barton, Fifty Sounds (Fifty Sounds)

A.K. Blakemore, The Manningtree Witches (Granta)

Kirsty Capes, Careless (Orion Fiction)

Sonia Faleiro, The Good Girls: An Ordinary Killing (Bloomsbury Circus)

Cal Flyn, Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape (William Collins)

Sabba Khan, The Roles We Play (Myriad Editions)

Jake Morris-Campbell, Corrigenda for Costafine Town (Blue Diode Press)

Rebecca Netley, The Whistling (Michael Joseph)

Yousif M. Qasmiyeh, Writing the Camp (Broken Sleep Books)

Jane Rogoyska, Surviving Katyn: Stalin's Polish Massacre and the Search for Truth (Oneworld)

Leone Ross, This One Sky Day (Faber)

Sunjeev Sahota, China Room (Harvill Secker)

Sathnam Sanghera, Empireland (Viking)

Julian Sayarer, Iberia (Fox, Finch & Tepper Ltd)

Anita Sethi, I Belong Here (Bloomsbury Wildlife)

Elif Shafak, The Island of Missing Trees (Penguin)

Stephanie Sy-Quia, Amnion (Granta Poetry)

Joelle Taylor, C+nto & Othered Poems (The Westbourne Press)

Lea Ypi, Free (Allen Lane)

Sandeep Parmar, Chair of the RSL Ondaatje Prize judging panel for 2022 says: "From seventeenth-century witch trials in England to a massacre in wartime Poland, the traumatic displacements of a Lebanese refugee camp to the deep scars of Empire on Britain, these, and the other longlisted books, take place to mean both geographical space and the imagined realities of being in the world. Every book teaches us something about how we carry the spirit of place within us across the breach of history through the perils of forgetting."

First awarded in 2004, the premise and broad remit of the prize creates unique lists of outstanding works and authors that you would not usually find sitting side by side. Previous recipients of the prize have included Aida Edemariam, Ruth Gilligan, Alan Johnson, Hisham Matar, Pascale Petit, Roger Robinson, Francis Spufford, Edmund de Waal, and Louisa Waugh.

The RSL Ondaatje Prize is one of 10 annual awards and prizes presented by the RSL, which bring the widest possible community of writers and readers together in celebration of the breadth of literature today. From debut works and unpublished short stories, through to the notoriously challenging second novel and outstanding contributions to literature, the RSL's awards and prizes celebrate the value of the written word in all its forms, whilst supporting emerging and established writers at both the beginning and at some of the most challenging moments of their careers. The RSL's other annual awards and prizes are: RSL International Writers awards, Companions of Literature, the Encore Award, the RSL Christopher Bland Prize, the RSL Giles St Aubyn Awards for Non-Fiction, the V.S. Pritchett Short Story Prize, the RSL Literature Matters Awards, the Sky Arts RSL Writers Awards and the Benson Medal.

The 2022 RSL Ondaatje Prize Shortlist will be announced on Wednesday 20 April and the winner will be announced on 4 May at Two Temple Place.

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