Marcia Hutchinson: The Mercy Step
5/20/202635 min
Welcome back to our Women's Prize 2026 spotlight series. Today we’re joined by Marcia Hutchinson, whose debut novel The Mercy Step is shortlisted for this year’s Women’s Prize and just won the Discovery Prize at the British Book Awards! Following the life of a child from the womb to age eleven, Marcia Hutchinson crafts a sharply-witted and tender portrait of a young girl’s quiet rebellion in 1960s Bradford. Marcia also founded Primary Colours, a multicultural educational publishing and training company based in Huddersfield, who helped create resources on cultural education, for example celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Empire Windrush arriving in the UK. Marcia was awarded an MBE in the Queens Birthday Honours list in 2010 for services to cultural diversity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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First 90 secondsSpeaker 10:00
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Jack Edwards· Host0:29
[upbeat music] Hello, and welcome to a very special series here on the Inklings Book Club podcast. My name is Jack Edwards, and in this series we will be meeting each of the six shortlisted authors for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2026. I have to say, I've been reading through the shortlist, and it is one of the strongest literary prize shortlists I have ever read, and I cannot wait to deep dive it with you. Now, the Women's Prize for Fiction is one of the most successful, influential, and popular literary prizes in the world, championing and amplifying women's voices and nurturing a global community of readers. The prize was established in 1996 to highlight the imbalance in coverage, respect, and reverence given to women writers versus their male peers. In doing so, they have created a platform for exceptional writing by women to shine. The prize is awarded annually to the writer with the best full-length novel of the year, written in English and