This Is About an Alligator and Nothing Else by Anna Dempsey won the inaugural £7,500 (about $10,040) Hilary Mantel Prize for Fiction, which was launched last September by AM Heath, the late Booker Prize-winning author's literary agency, along with publisher John Murray, the Bookseller reported. Uduak-Abasi Ekong was named runner-up for A Kind of Resurrection and will receive £2,500 (about $3,345). Dempsey also has been given a place on an Arvon residential writing course and Ekong a place on an Arvon masterclass.
Bill Hamilton, Mantel's agent at AM Heath, said: "The submissions were read by an enthusiastic team of readers from AM Heath and John Murray. The closer we got to a manageable number to recommend to the judges, the bigger the contrasts in the imagination and style and voices of the writers: settings from all around the world, everything from satire to the supernatural, from contemporary to ancient myth. It has been a remarkable testimony to the invention and fluency of aspiring writers of all kinds, and we are delighted to have found our terrific winner and runner-up amongst them."
Judge Nicholas Pearson, Mantel's editor of 18 years, commented: "The first sentence of This Is About an Alligator and Nothing Else immediately makes you sit up and listen. Anna Dempsey gives powerful and mesmeric voice to a 12-year-old girl living with her father on the edge of the Everglades, and all five judges agreed that she should be our winner.
"We were also absorbed by the early chapters of our runner-up, Uduak-Abasi Ekong, whose novel is an atmospheric and seductive ghost story set in modern Lagos. Throughout her career, Hilary Mantel cared deeply for novelists making their first steps, and I feel sure she would have wanted to support these two exceptional writers."