The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell has sold more copies than any other title on the 2023 Women’s prize for fiction shortlist in the run-up to the announcement of the winner.
The historical novel sold 72,819 copies by the first week of June, according to trade magazine The Bookseller. The winner of the Women’s prize – which rewards the best novel from the past year written by a woman and published in the UK – is due to be revealed on Wednesday at a ceremony in London.
Louise Kennedy’s debut novel Trespasses came in second, selling a total of 50,628 copies, while Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead was next, having sold 41,245 copies.
The Marriage Portrait fictionalises the story of Lucrezia di Cosimo de’Medici, who was forced to marry the Duke of Ferrara in 1558. O’Farrell “has shuffled historical fact, portraiture and poetic fantasy”, wrote Lucy Hughes-Hallett in her Guardian review of the novel, and “alternates passages of plain prose with others rich in musical cadences and lavishly decorated with imagery and heightened vocabulary”.
The chair of judges, broadcaster and writer Louise Minchin, said that The Marriage Portrait is an “exquisite book” that transports readers to “a world that you won’t have lived in”.
Kennedy’s Trespasses, about a schoolteacher living in 1970s Belfast, won debut novel of the year at the 2023 British Book awards. Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead, a reimagining of Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, won the 2023 Pulitzer prize for fiction.
Kingsolver’s novel “transposes this very English, quasi-autobiographical Bildungsroman to her own home territory of Appalachia,” wrote Elizabeth Lowry in the Guardian.
The winner of the Women’s prize will receive £30,000. If either O’Farrell or Kingsolver win this year’s award, they will make history as the only woman to have received the prize twice. Kingsolver previously won in 2010 for The Lacuna, and O’Farrell won in 2020 for Hamnet, which became a bestseller.
Other titles on this year’s shortlist include Priscilla Morris’ Black Butterflies, which sold 5,979 copies in total before 3 June; Laline Paull’s Pod, which sold 2,901 copies; and Jacqueline Crooks’ Fire Rush, which sold 2,375 copies.
Morris and Crooks join Kennedy in being first-time novelists shortlisted for the award. Paull was previously shortlisted in 2015 for her debut novel The Bees. Minchin’s fellow judges for this year’s prize are author Irenosen Okojie, Labour MP Tulip Siddiq, writer Bella Mackie and novelist Rachel Joyce.
Commenting on the shortlist, Minchin said that “The diversity of thought and creativity of women writers at the moment is vast and exciting and inspiring. The list is eclectic and there are so many different types of stories and types of voices.”
In 2022, Ruth Ozeki won the prize for The Book of Form and Emptiness, a novel about a boy who begins to hear voices coming from inanimate objects after the loss of his father. The novel rose 431% in sales volume week-on-week after it won last June.
