We’re delighted to announce the longlist for the RSL Ondaatje Prize 2022, as selected by this year’s judges Sandeep Parmar (Chair), Patrice Lawrence and Philippe Sands!

An annual prize of £10,000, the RSL Ondaatje Prize is awarded by the RSL to an outstanding work of fiction, non-fiction or poetry that best evokes the spirit of a place.

Congratulations to all of the longlisted authors:

Hester Barron & Claire Langhamer, Class of ‘37 (John Blake)

Polly Barton, Fifty Sounds (Fifty Sounds)

A.K. Blakemore, The Manningtree Witches (Granta)

Kirsty Capes, Careless (Orion Fiction)

Sonia Faleiro, The Good Girls: An Ordinary Killing (Bloomsbury Circus)

Cal Flyn, Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape (William Collins)

Sabba Khan, The Roles We Play (Myriad Editions)

Jake Morris-Campbell, Corrigenda for Costafine Town (Blue Diode Press)

Rebecca Netley, The Whistling (Michael Joseph)

Yousif M. Qasmiyeh, Writing the Camp (Broken Sleep Books)

Jane Rogoyska, Surviving Katyn: Stalin’s Polish Massacre and the Search for Truth (Oneworld)

Leone Ross, This One Sky Day (Faber)

Sunjeev Sahota, China Room (Harvill Secker)

Sathnam Sanghera, Empireland (Viking)

Julian Sayarer, Iberia (Fox, Finch & Tepper Ltd)

Anita Sethi, I Belong Here (Bloomsbury Wildlife)

Elif Shafak, The Island of Missing Trees (Penguin)

Stephanie Sy-Quia, Amnion (Granta Poetry)

Joelle Taylor, C+nto & Othered Poems (The Westbourne Press)

Lea Ypi, Free (Allen Lane)

Sandeep Parmar, Chair of the RSL Ondaatje Prize judging panel for 2022 says: “From seventeenth-century witch trials in England to a massacre in wartime Poland, the traumatic displacements of a Lebanese refugee camp to the deep scars of Empire on Britain, these, and the other longlisted books, take place to mean both geographical space and the imagined realities of being in the world. Every book teaches us something about how we carry the spirit of place within us across the breach of history through the perils of forgetting.”

Looking ahead, the 2022 RSL Ondaatje Prize Shortlist will be announced on Wednesday 20 April and the winner will be announced on Wednesday 4 May at Two Temple Place. More information is available in the official press release.