Esi Edugyan

In honour of International Women’s Day, the Orange Prize for Fiction, celebrating “excellence, originality, and accessibility in women’s writing,” has announced its 2012 longlist, which includes two celebrated Canadian authors.

Emma Donoghue, whose novel Room was shortlisted for the 2011 Orange Prize and won the 2010 Writers’ Trust Prize, is nominated for The Sealed Letter, a 2008 novel published by HarperCollins. Picador reissued a special paperback version for the U.K. market in early 2012, one of 12 titles marking the publisher’s 40th anniversary.

Donoghue is accompanied by fellow Canadian Esi Edugyan, who made the longlist with Half-Blood Blues (Thomas Allen Publishers), which won the 2011 Scotiabank Giller Prize and was  nominated today for the B.C. Book Prize.

Here is the Orange Prize longlist:

• Esi Edugyan, Half-Blood Blues (Thomas Allen Publishers)
• Karin Altenberg, Island of Wings (House of Anansi Press)
• Aifric Campbell, On the Floor (Serpent’s Tail/Consortium)
• Leah Hager Cohen, The Grief of Others (Riverhead/Penguin)
• Emma Donoghue, The Sealed Letter (HarperCollins)
• Anne Enright, The Forgotten Waltz (McClelland & Stewart)
• Roopa Farooki, The Flying Man (Headline Review)
• Jaimy Gordon, Lord of Misrule (Vintage Canada)
• Georgina Harding, Painter of Silence (Bloomsbury)
• Jane Harris, Gillespie and I (HarperCollins)
• Francesca Kay, The Translation of the Bones (Phoenix)
• A.L. Kennedy, The Blue Book (Jonathan Cape)
• Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus (Doubleday Canada)
• Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles (HarperCollins)
• Cynthia Ozick, Foreign Bodies (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt/Thomas Allen)
• Ann Patchett, State of Wonder (HarperCollins)
• Ali Smith, There but for the (Penguin)
• Anna Stothard, The Pink Hotel (Alma Books)
• Stella Tillyard, Tides of War (Vintage Canada)
• Amy Waldman, The Submission (HarperCollins)

Judged by Joanna Trollope, Lisa Appignanesi, Victoria Derbyshire, Natalie Haynes, and Natasha Kaplinksy, the Orange Prize awards the winner with a cheque for £30,000 and a limited-edition bronze figurine known as “Bessie.” The shortlist will be announced April 17 and the awards ceremony takes place May 30.