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Winner gets a collection of PG Wodehouse novels, a jeroboam of champagne and the honour of naming a pig
A first novel by the journalist and critic Sam Leith is on the shortlist for the most unusual of the annual caravan of literary awards. The prize is a collection of PG Wodehouse novels, a jeroboam of champagne and the honour of naming a Gloucester Spot pig.
The Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize, now in its 12th year, is for the novel that best captures the comic spirit of PG Wodehouse. Last year it was won, to some raised eyebrows, by Ian McEwan's Solar.
Leith has made the list for The Coincidence Engine, which was also nominated as one of Waterstone's first novels to watch. It has been described as "Philip K Dick meets Evelyn Waugh".
Another first novel, Serious Men, by Manu Joseph, set in contemporary India, was also nominated for last year's Man Asian prize. Comfort and Joy, by the journalist and novelist India Knight, follows a woman's doomed attempts to create the perfect Christmas.
The News Where You Are, about a luckless Midlands regional news presenter, is the second novel from Catherine O'Flynn, described by Fay Weldon in her Guardian review as "the JG Ballard of Birmingham". Her last, What Was Lost, took the 2007 Costa first novel prize. Also on the list is Super Sad True Love Story, a blackly humourous dystopian satire by Gary Shteyngart.
The winner will be announced in time for this year's Hay literary festival, whose director, Peter Florence, said: "We've never needed such a dose of good humour, and this extraordinary shortlist is full of comedy, wit, lightness and frivolity even when facing the darker aspects of the world today."
