Read the 2022 longlist: an extract from After Sappho by Selby Wynn Schwartz
After Sappho is a joyous reimagining of the lives of a brilliant group of feminists, sapphists, artists and writers from the past. Read the opening words here
Selby Wynn Schwartz
Selby Wynn Schwartz was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2022. She is an award-winning writer, but with After Sappho she joins that select band of authors who have been longlisted for the Booker for their debut novel.
Schwartz is the author of The Bodies of Others: Drag Dances and their Afterlives, which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ Nonfiction and won the Sally Banes Prize from the American Society of Theatre Research. Her forthcoming novella A Life in Chameleons, due out in 2023, won the Reflex Press Novella Award. The author of numerous published articles, Schwartz holds a PhD in comparative literature (Italian/French) from the University of California, Berkeley and currently teaches writing at Stanford University.
A poetic patchwork of fragments of literary history that together take shape as an intergenerational tale of the Lesbian family. An ancestry eruditely, playfully recovered.
— The 2022 judges on After Sappho
All nominated books
After Sappho was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2022. A joyous reimagining of the lives of a brilliant group of feminists, sapphists, artists and writers from the past, as they battle for control over their lives, for liberation and for justice.
