Authors including Alexander McCall Smith, Irvine Welsh, Caitlin Moran and Nina Stibbe have been shortlisted for the 2015 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize for comic fiction. The six shortlisted novels are McCall Smith’s Fatty O’Leary’s Dinner Party, Welsh’s A Decent Ride, Joseph O’Neill’s The Dog, and three fiction debuts by female writers – Moran’s How To Build a Girl, Stibbe’s Man at the Helm and Helen Lederer’s Losing It. The winner will be announced just before the Hay festival, which runs from 21 to 31 May.
The 2015 Wodehouse prize shortlist was selected by a judging panel of BBC Radio 4’s Today programme presenter and author James Naughtie, Everyman’s Library publisher David Campbell, and Hay festival director and founder, Peter Florence.
Florence said: “There are so any different kinds of laughter here. Comedy as a savage weapon, comedy as bleak despair, comedy as wry observation and as warm humour and affection. These astonishingly gifted writers can turn phrases, create characters to love, and rattle good yarns. There are wonders here and joys. We were delighted by them. Wodehouse would be proud of them.”
Previous Wodehouse prize winners include Edward St Aubyn, Howard Jacobson, Monica Lewycka, Ian McEwan and the late Sir Terry Pratchett.
The shortlist
Losing It by Helen Lederer (Pan Macmillan)
“In debt, divorced and desperate” runs the tagline for the comedian’s debut novel, in which a has-been media personality is asked to be the front woman for a new diet pill.
Fatty O’Leary’s Dinner Party by Alexander McCall Smith (Polygon)
More weight woes from the ridiculously prolific author behind the No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency and the Isabel Dalhousie novels. Irish-American antiques dealer Fatty takes a 40th birthday celebratory trip to Ireland which goes farcically wrong.
How to Build a Girl by Caitlin Moran (Ebury)
A Portnoy’s Complaint for girls? The follow-up to How to Be A Woman is a coming-of-age novel with a similarly autobiographical flavour, as a poor but precocious Wolverhampton girl becomes a teenage music journalist. “It could make you laugh out loud with one hand tied behind its back, while wanking itself off to fantasies of Satan,” promised the Guardian review.
The Dog by Joseph O’Neill (4th Estate)
O’Neill was Man Booker-longlisted for this, as he was for his previous novel, the critical and commercial smash Netherland. Here the anonymous anti-hero is a New York attorney who has fled a failed relationship to work as the factotum for a wealthy Dubai family – part of “the new elite of international, plane-hopping white-collar brains servicing the planet’s affluent”, as the Guardian review had it.
Man at the Helm by Nina Stibbe (Viking, Penguin)
This 70s-set comic novel follows her wonderful memoir about nannying for London’s literati. A divorcee and her children blow into an English village, and try – oh how they try – to fit in. “Her ear for off-kilter dialogue is as brilliantly tuned as it was in Love, Nina; and she is a maestro of bathos, continually undercutting vivid gaiety with moments of horrible sadness,” wrote Alex Clark in her Guardian review.
A Decent Ride by Irvine Welsh (Jonathan Cape)
For his 10th novel, to be published in April, Irvine Welsh reintroduces us to “Juice” Terry Lawson, “top shagger, drug-dealer, gonzo-porn-star and taxi-driver”, also seen in Glue.
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