Historical fiction – from love among heroes in ancient Greece to bickering jazz musicians in Nazi-occupied Paris – forms a significant chunk of this year’s Orange prize longlist, which has been revealed to coincide with International Women’s Day. Twenty novels made the list for Britain’s only annual prize for fiction written by women, including books by Emma Donoghue, Anne Enright, AL Kennedy and Ali Smith.

There were five books by debut novelists and four from writers with their “tricky” second novel. Joanna Trollope, the chair of judges, said the breadth of subject matter was particularly striking.

“It is the diversity that really characterises this longlist,” she said. “Yes, there are a fair number of historical novels, but they vary hugely from a gay cabaret artist in Berlin in the second world war to a preacher going off to deal with lost souls on a Hebridean island in the 1830s.”

A total of 143 novels were submitted for the prize, many dealing with historical subjects and many set during the second world war, said Trollope. “It is because, I think, it is just so unresolved. Writers inevitably go back to unfinished business and try and work it out somehow, so it is a very natural topic.”

Many serious subjects had been tackled, she said, which was a good thing. “There’s an extraordinarily unafraid quality in women when it comes to both emotions and writing. Fiction is a way into life’s great dilemmas and it is more than justified that serious stuff gets aired in fiction – quite apart from the fact that comic fiction is unbelievably hard to write.”

The list for this year’s prize, the 17th, consists of eight British writers, seven American, three Irish, one Swedish and one Canadian author. More.

See: The Guardian