Ruth Ozeki wint de Women's Prize for Fiction 2022 met haar vierde roman, The Book of Form and Emptiness. De auteur en filmmaker wint een geldprijs van £30,000 en het kunstwerk 'Bessie'. Haar werk werd door de jury geprezen om de sprankelende schrijfstijl, warmte, intelligentie en ontroering.

De Women's Prize for Fiction werd opgericht in 1996 en gaat naar de beste roman van het jaar geschreven door een vrouw, in het Engels en gepubliceerd in het Verenigd Koninkrijk. Ruth Ozeki bedankte in haar speech de vrouwen en vrouweninstellingen die haar gedurende haar carriière hebben gesteund: 'I wanted to call out the names of the women who have supported me, because now more than ever this is a time that we need to speak out and rewrite the dominant narratives that have landed us into quite dire straits.'

Het boek

One year after the death of his beloved musician father, thirteen-year-old Benny Oh begins to hear voices. The voices belong to the things in his house—a sneaker, a broken Christmas ornament, a piece of wilted lettuce. Although Benny doesn't understand what these things are saying, he can sense their emotional tone; some are pleasant, a gentle hum or coo, but others are snide, angry and full of pain. When his mother, Annabelle, develops a hoarding problem, the voices grow more clamorous.
 
At first, Benny tries to ignore them, but soon the voices follow him outside the house, onto the street and at school, driving him at last to seek refuge in the silence of a large public library, where objects are well-behaved and know to speak in whispers. There, Benny discovers a strange new world. He falls in love with a mesmerizing street artist with a smug pet ferret, who uses the library as her performance space. He meets a homeless philosopher-poet, who encourages him to ask important questions and find his own voice amongst the many.
 
And he meets his very own Book—a talking thing—who narrates Benny’s life and teaches him to listen to the things that truly matter.

Naast juryvoorzitter Mary Ann Sieghart zaten ook journalist en redacteur Lorraine Candy, auteur Dorothy Koomson, journalist en auteur Anita Sethi en presentato en auteur Pandora Sykes in de jury. Volgens Sieghart is The Book of Form and Emptiness een 'celebration of the power of books and reading', dat grote thema's als leven en dood behandelt. Ze noemt Ozeki 'a truly original and masterful storyteller'.