Pan Macmillan South Africa announced that Angela Makholwa’s fourth novel, The Blessed Girl, published in the United Kingdom by Bloomsbury, has been shortlisted for the Comedy Women in Print (CWIP) prize.
The brainchild of award-winning comedian Helen Lederer, CWIP launched in 2018 to celebrate and support female comedy writers, and is open to novels published in the UK and Ireland.
The CWIP shortlist includes Candice Carty-Williams' Queenie (Orion), Jeannette Winterson’s Frankissstein (Jonathan Cape), Beth O’Leary’s The Flatshare (Quercus) and Big Girl, Small Town by Michelle Gallen (John Murray), Reasons to be Cheerful by Nina Stibbe (Penguin Random House) and The Bookish Life of Nina Hill by Abbi Waxman (Headline).
Judges for the award are Marian Keyes, Lolly Adefope, Pauline McLynn, Joanna Scanlan, Paula Wilcox and last year’s prize winner, Laura Steven.
Keyes, who chaired the panel said: “I am absolutely delighted with our list. The range is glorious – everything from lighthearted commercial fiction to literary fiction – from established names to new talent. It’s a demonstration of all the different ways in which women can be funny in print. It was a pleasure and very exciting to read all the submissions, and these are shortlists we are very proud of.”
Makholwa said: “I’m honoured to have been shortlisted among such brilliant female comic writers. It’s affirming to finally see women’s writing being acknowledged for its diversity instead of having our writing classified according to our gender. I hope this prize heralds a new era where we will see terms like ‘Chick Lit’ replaced by more nuanced categorisations of our work.”
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