Sheena Patel and Parini Shroff, writers of Indian origin, make it to the Women’s Prize for Fiction longlist

Both I'm a Fan and The Bandit Queens are feminist push-backs against patriarchy, done with subtlety.

I’m a Fan by Sheena Patel, Granta Books; The Bandit Queens by Parini Shroff, HarperCollins. (Source: Amazon.com)

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Two writers of Indian origin, Sheena Patel and Parini Shroff, have made it to the longlist of the annual Women’s Prize for Fiction 2023, one of the United Kingdom’s most prestigious literary awards, for their respective debuts — I’m a Fan and The Bandit Queens. The shortlist of the prize, awarded to books written by women in English and published in the preceding year, will be announced on April 26, and the winner on June 14.

Dealing with love in the age of social media, dating apps and tenuous online privacy, I’m a Fan by Patel — who’s also an assistant director for film and television — tells the story of a woman in London who’s obsessed with a man and the woman he’s having an affair with. The narrator, who goes to great lengths to uncover hidden parts of their lives, is unnamed, her voice aggressive and retaliatory after a lifetime of battling patriarchal oppression. She tells her story in the first person and present tense, mimicking the tone and intimacy of a diary but covering novelistic ground with the voyeuristic and unnerving details she employs to describe the lives of her Instagram victims.

The Bandit Queens is a feminist revenge thriller with an interesting premise: what if a woman whose husband disappears actually does her a favour and she enjoys being a widow? If that wasn’t enough, Shroff escalates the stakes: what if other women of her village want that widowed status too, inspired by the haloed reputation of fear, admiration and murder that follows her wherever she goes?

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The story snowballs into a darkly hilarious sequence of women fed up with abusive and aggressive husbands, enlisting the services of Geeta, the protagonist, who only wants to boost her jewellery business but gets dragged into more nefarious pursuits.

Shroff lives in San Francisco and is a practising attorney. Once this debut garners more headlines, as it is likely to, she is sure to attract the wrath of the perpetually online, always-ready-to-take-umbrage social-media community, who profess the virtues of men’s-rights activism. But if she can muster even a shred of the wit with which she fictionalises complicated contemporary realities like patriarchy, caste, sexual violence and revenge fantasies, she is sure to come out on top.

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