The shortlist for the Rathbones Folio Prize 2021 announced February 10 includes one sff work and a memoir by a well-known sff writer. The Prize is given “to celebrate the best literature of our time, regardless of form.”  The winner receives a £30,000 prize.

Monique Roffey’s The Mermaid of Black Conch, “a feminist revision of an old Taino myth,” is on the list, as is Carmen Maria Machado’s nonfiction work about domestic abuse, In the Dream House: A Memoir. 

All books considered for the prize are nominated by the Folio Academy, an international group of more than 250 writers and critics. The three judges for the 2021 prize are poet Roger Robinson, the Irish writer, editor and broadcaster Sinéad Gleeson and novelist and short story writer Jon McGregor. The winner will be announced March 24.

Here is the complete shortlist:

• Indelicacy – Amina Cain (Daunt Books)
• handiwork – Sara Baume (Tramp Press)
• Poor – Caleb Femi (Penguin)
• My Darling from the Lions – Rachel Long (Picador)
• In the Dream House: A Memoir – Carmen Maria Machado (Serpent’s Tail)
• A Ghost in the Throat – Doireann Ní Ghríofa (Tramp Press)
• The Mermaid of Black Conch – Monique Roffey (Peepal Tree Press)
• As You Were – Elaine Feeney (Harvill Secker)