The Ondaatje Prize of the Royal Society of Literature, an annual award of £10,000 “for a distinguished work of fiction, non-fiction or poetry evoking the spirit of a place”, has been won by Diana McCaulay, a Jamaican writer and environmental activist, for her novel A House for Miss Pauline (Dialogue Books).
Claire Armitstead, chair of the judges, said the book was “an evocative and powerful novel of belonging, with a fabulously eccentric protagonist, which complicates everything we assume about colonial history in all the right ways”.
McCaulay has written six published novels and numerous short stories and articles. She won the Commonwealth Short Story prize in 2012 and 2022, and is the founder of the Jamaica Environment Trust.
The other books short-listed for the Ondaatje Prize included two of my own favourites from last year: Greyhound by Joanna Pocock (Fitzcarraldo Editions) and The Finest Hotel in Kabul: A People’s History of Afghanistan by Lyse Doucet (Hutchinson Heinemann). Also short-listed were Helm by Sarah Hall (Faber); Saraswati by Gurnaik Johal (Serpent’s Tail); and The Benefactors by Wendy Erskine (Sceptre).