From a poetry collection about rural Ireland to a tour of modern Russia dubbed an “anti-travelogue”, six books have been shortlisted for one of the UK’s more unusual literary prizes: the RSL Ondaatje award, which goes to the book which best evokes “the spirit of a place”.
Worth £10,000, the Ondaatje can be won by fiction, nonfiction or poetry, with judges Kate Adie, Moniza Alvi and Mark Lawson this year selecting one poetry title for their shortlist, Jane Clarke’s The River. Alvi praised Clarke’s “quiet, lucid, subtle poems”, which she said were “nevertheless urgent in their presentation of a farming background in rural Ireland, and the poet’s enduring attachment to it”.
Clarke, who combines her writing with work as a management consultant in not-for-profit organisations, is up against five nonfiction titles for this year’s prize. James Rebanks was picked for his account of shepherding, The Shepherd’s Life, a bestseller that Alvi said was “compelling, authentic and absolutely unromanticised”, revealing “an honourable tradition in a changing rural world”. Alexandra Harris’s look at writers’ responses to English weather over the centuries, Weatherland, also made the list, praised by Alvi for making “an original contribution to the ‘spirit of place’”.
Brian Dillon’s look at the history of explosives through a 1916 fire at a munitions factory in Kent, The Great Explosion, was also picked by judges, alongside Samanth Subramanian’s history of the Sri Lankan civil war, This Divided Island, and Peter Pomerantsev’s Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible. Lawson called Pomerantsev’s contender “a sort of anti-travelogue, making the reader desperately keen never to go near the places described: the Muscovite, Siberian, American and English haunts of those who became super-rich from the division of state assets and the new entrepreneurial possibilities that arose in post-Soviet Russia”.
The winner will be announced on 23 May, joining former winners including Alan Johnson, who won for a memoir of his childhood This Boy, and Justin Marozzi’s history of Baghdad, City of Peace, City of Blood.
