The judges of this year’s Prize, Lemn Sissay (Chair), Meena Kandasamy, and Simon Savidge, have selected the following for the shortlist:

Susie Alegre, Freedom to Think (Atlantic Books)

Jo Browning Wroe, A Terrible Kindness (Faber & Faber)

Bonnie Garmus, Lessons in Chemistry (Doubleday)

Paterson Joseph, The Secret Diaries of Charles Ignatius Sancho (Dialogue Books)

Jill Nalder, Love from the Pink Palace (Wildfire)

Devika Ponnambalam, I Am Not Your Eve (Bluemoose Books)

For full details, see the press release.

The winner will be announced on Thursday 8 June.

Now in its fifth year, the Prize is an annual award of £10,000 celebrating outstanding achievements for a debut novelist or non-fiction writer first published aged 50 or over.