In the UK, the shortlist for the 2018 Women’s Prize for Fiction has been announced.

The six shortlisted titles are:

• The Idiot (Elif Batuman, Penguin)
• The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock (Imogen Hermes Gowar, Harvill Secker)
• Sight (Jessie Greengrass, John Murray)
• When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife (Meena Kandasamy, Atlantic)
• Home Fire (Kamila Shamsie, Bloomsbury)
• Sing, Unburied, Sing (Jesmyn Ward, Bloomsbury)

The shortlist was chosen from a longlist announced in March. Of the six books chosen, three of them (The Idiot, The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock and Sight) are debuts.

Sarah Sands, 2018 chair of judges and editor of BBC Radio 4’s Today program said ‘the shortlist was chosen without fear or favour’. ‘We lost some big names, with regret, but narrowed down the list to the books which spoke most directly and truthfully to the judges. The themes of the shortlist have both contemporary and lasting resonance encompassing the birth of the internet, race, sexual violence, grief … and mermaids.’

The winner of the £30,000 (A$55,010) prize, which is presented annually to the best novel written in English by a woman, will be announced on 6 June.