Interview with Tayari Jones

When I arrive at her publishers in Bloomsbury, Tayari Jones is in the middle of signing 5000 book plates which will be bound into the UK edition of her novel Silver Sparrow. Such are the demands on her since her novel An American Marriage won the 2019 Women’s Prize for Fiction.

She is resolutely professional but also clearly somewhat up against it on this short UK visit. She actually wrote Silver Sparrow before An American Marriage but she has deep affection for the earlier novel – its characters are “my favourite people”, she says – which was published in the UK in March 2020.

The novel is about a bigamist called James Witherspoon who has two teenage daughters, Dana and Chaurisse, with different mothers. James lives with Chaurisse and her mother but visits Dana and her mother on a weekly basis – Dana knows about Chaurisse but Chaurisse initially has no idea Dana exists.

The Women's Prize for Fiction 2019

The Women’s Prize shortlist of 2019 was one of our favourites for years. Kate Williams, the chair of judges, has revealed that the panel deliberated for four hours to choose a winner. The eventual winner, Tayari Jones for her fourth novel An American Marriage, said “I think, in these times, we need women’s voices more than ever,” and we could not agree more.

Our money was on Madeleine Miller’s Circe, which regular readers know we were bowled over by last month. We felt that Miller’s scholarly classicism combined with her hyper-engaging prose style would once again prove a hit with the judges (her first novel, The Song of Achilles won what was then called the Orange Prize in 2012).

We also thought Pat Barker was in with a shout for Silence of the Girls, her 14th novel, which similarly offered a feminist slant on a Homeric epic.