The literary world is buzzing with the announcement of the 2025 Women’s Prize for Fiction longlist, revealed on March 4, featuring 16 genre-spanning novels by women from around the globe.
Among the standout voices are three African authors:
- Crooked Seeds by Karen Jennings (South Africa)
- Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Nigeria)
- The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami (Morocco)
This year’s longlist, unveiled earlier this week, showcases 16 novels that explore sweeping topics from imperialism and twentieth-century conflict to immigration, exile, and the rise of big tech. Celebrating its 30th anniversary, the Women’s Prize for Fiction continues to honor originality and accessibility, as envisioned by its Founding Advisory Committee.
Kit de Waal, Chair of Judges, praised the list, saying:
“These are important, far-reaching novels where brilliantly realised characters navigate the complexities of families and modern relationships, whilst pushing the boundaries placed around them. It’s a list that readers will devour and shows the echoes of world events on everyday lives as well as the power and brilliance of women writing today.”
About The Authors
Karen Jennings:
A South African literary talent born in Cape Town in 1982, brings her novel Crooked Seeds to the 2025 Women’s Prize for Fiction longlist. The daughter of an Afrikaans mother and an English father—both teachers—Jennings holds master’s degrees in English literature and creative writing from the University of Cape Town, a PhD in creative writing from the University of KwaZulu-Natal, and is currently pursuing doctoral work in history at the University of Johannesburg.
Her career spans continents and genres, from editing Feast, Famine & Potluck, a 2014 collection of African short stories, to earning a 2021 Booker Prize longlisted for An Island, a novel crafted with a Miles Moreland Foundation Writing Scholarship.
Now married to a Brazilian scientist and having lived in Brazil during the COVID-19 pandemic, Jennings infuses Crooked Seeds—published by Hogarth in April 2024—with her signature depth, likely exploring South Africa’s complex past and present through a lens sharpened by her postdoctoral research on science and literature.
As a voice from Southern Africa, her accolades, including the 2009 Maskew Miller Longman Literature Award and a co-win of the 2021 K. Sello Duiker Memorial Award, underscore her growing stature on this global stage.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie:
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, born in 1977 in Enugu, Nigeria, to Igbo parents, is a literary luminary whose novel Dream Count graces the 2025 Women’s Prize for Fiction longlist. Raised in Nsukka, where her father was a professor and her mother the first female registrar at the University of Nigeria, Adichie studied medicine briefly before pursuing communications and political science in the United States at Drexel University and Eastern Connecticut State University, later earning a master’s in creative writing from Johns Hopkins University.
Her debut novel, Purple Hibiscus (2003), won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, but it was Half of a Yellow Sun (2006)—a searing portrayal of the Biafran War—that clinched the 2007 Women’s Prize for Fiction, marking her as a global voice for Nigeria’s stories. Now splitting time between the U.S. and Nigeria, Adichie’s works, including Americanah (2013) and her viral TED Talk-turned-book We Should All Be Feminists (2014), explore identity, migration, and gender with unflinching clarity.
Dream Count, her latest, intertwines the lives of four women across continents, reinforcing her mastery of weaving personal narratives with broader cultural echoes.
Laila Lalami:
Born in 1968 in Rabat, Morocco, to a working-class family, Laila Lalami brings her fifth novel, The Dream Hotel, to the 2025 Women’s Prize for Fiction longlist. After mastering Moroccan Arabic at home and learning French through children’s books, she earned a licence ès lettres in English from Mohammed V University, an MA in linguistics from University College London via a British Council fellowship, and a PhD in linguistics from the University of Southern California, where she settled in 1992.
Her literary career took flight with Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits (2005), a critically acclaimed tale of Moroccan immigrants, followed by The Moor’s Account (2014), a Pulitzer Prize finalist about Estevanico, the first Black explorer of America, and The Other Americans (2019), a National Book Award finalist.
Now a distinguished professor of creative writing at UC Riverside, Lalami—recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a 2010 Orange Prize longlisting for Secret Son—delivers The Dream Hotel, a speculative narrative of a woman detained after her dreams are monitored, blending her North African roots with a sharp, futuristic gaze.
Together, Jennings, Adichie, and Lalami represent a stunning cross-section of Africa—Southern, Western, and Northern—embodying the prize’s mission to amplify diverse women’s voices.
The shortlist will be announced on April 2, 2025, with the winner crowned on June 12, 2025.
Congratulations Karen Jennings, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Laila Lalami on this great win!
Bakare Oluwatobiloba
I write to educate, motivate and define history with literature. Just being me!
