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A white woman wears her brown hair in a low bun and looks away from the camera. She is posing against a cream wall, with her arms folded. She wears a white t shirt with a black dress over top.

Gwendoline Riley

Gwendoline Riley is a novelist and short-story writer

Riley was born in London. She is the author of My Phantoms, which was shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize and longlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize; of First Love, shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for fiction, the Goldsmiths Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Gordon Burn Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for fiction; and of Cold Water, Sick Notes, Joshua Spassky, and Opposed Positions. She has also won a Betty Trask Award and a Somerset Maugham Award, and has been shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. In 2018, The Times Literary Supplement named her as one of the 20 best British and Irish novelists working today. 

The Palm House was longlisted for the Booker Prize 2026.  

All nominated books

The Palm House by Gwendoline Riley
A novel of enduring friendships and small mercies, The Palm House offers us Gwendoline Riley’s trademark keen observation and wit, and leaves us – somehow – with a curious sense of possibility