How to be Both by Ali Smith has been announced as the winner of the 2015 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction.
We had 12 reading groups shadowing the Bailey prize. The groups had a great time discussing the shortlisted titles and you can read their reviews here.
How to Be Both
How to Be Both is a novel all about art’s versatility. Borrowing from painting’s fresco technique to make an original literary double-take, it’s a fast-moving genre-bending conversation between forms, times, truths and fictions. There’s a Renaissance artist of the 1460s. There’s the child of a child of the 1960s. Two tales of love and injustice twist into a singular yarn where time gets timeless, structural gets playful, knowing gets mysterious, fictional gets real – and all life’s givens get a second chance.
The novel comes in two editions – one begins with the artist’s story and the other with the girl’s. Readers are free to choose which they want to read first.
About the author
Ali Smith was born in Inverness in August 1962 and lives in Cambridge. She is the author of several novels including Hotel World, which was shortlisted for the Booker and the Orange Prize, and The Accidental which won the Whitbread Novel Award.
How to Be Both was shortlisted for the 2014 Man Booker Prize and 2015 Folio Prize and has won the 2014 Costa Novel Award, 2014 Goldsmiths Prize and Saltire Literary Book of the Year 2014.
Get involved
What do you think of the winning title? Do you agree with the judges’ decision?
Have you read any of the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction 2015 shortlisted books? You can post a review or share your thoughts with us on Facebook, Google+ and Twitter using @ReadingAgency @BaileysPrize #ThisBookClub.
