Books by Linda Grant and Howard Jacobson have made it onto the shortlist for the 2020 Wingate Prize, awarded annually to the best book to “translate the idea of Jewishness to the general reader”.
Jacobson’s Live a Little, a story of love between two people in their nineties, has been described by the judges as “rollicking good fun”, while Grant’s A Stranger City features both “easily recognisable, long-resident London Jews, as well as more exotic recent Jewish arrivals from Iran”.
Also making the shortlist were Kafka's Last Trial: The Case of a Literacy Legacy by Benjamin Balint; Liar by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen; Dani Shapiro’s Inheritance; Lake Success by Gary Shteyngart; and George Szirtes’s The Photographer at Sixteen.
Both fiction and non-fiction works are considered for the £4,000 prize, now in its 43rd year and jointly awarded by the Harold Hyam Wingate Charitable Foundation and JW3.
