It’s hard for me to justify why I’m so keen to read the prizewinners for The Bellwether, when I can actually only strike two books from the list of winners below, but I have read sections of the two earliest prize-winners and I was so smitten with their prose that I made it a Reading Project. Mudbound was one of my Favourites of 2008 and I have a hunch that, when I finally do get around to the others here that they’ll be appearing on Favourite Lists to come.

✔2000 Donna Gershton’s Kissing the Virgin’s Mouth
✔2002 Gayle Brandeis’ The Book of Dead Birds
2004 Marjorie Kowalski Cole’s Correcting the Landscape
✔2006 Hilary Jordan’s Mudbound
✔2008 Heidi Durrow’s The Girl Who Fell From the Sky
2010 Naomi Benaron’s Running the Rift
2012 Susan Nussbaum’s Good Kings Bad Kings
2014 Ron Childress And West is West
✔2016 Lisa Ko The Leavers
2019 Katherine Seligman If You Knew
2021 Jamila Minnicks Gleason Moonrise over New Jessup