Diana Rajchel’s Divorcing a Real Witch has already drawn a wave of positive reviews from the Wiccan community, and now the practical guide is set for wider attention after making it on to the shortlist for this year’s Diagram prize.

Going to the “oddest book title of the year”, the lineup for the Bookseller magazine’s annual award highlights “a year of astonishing publishing depth, range and bat-guano eccentricity”, the magazine said on Thursday. Rajchel’s title is competing with the guide to a two-day pavement symposium, Advanced Pavement Research, and a history of the evolution of genitals of “bugs, birds and beasts”, Nature’s Nether Regions.

Diagram nominee Divorcing a Real Witch

Divorcing a Real Witch “fills a huge gap in the resources that witches and pagans have in the areas of family and relationships”, according to its publisher, Moon Books. Subtitled “For Pagans and the People That Used to Love Them”, it details the break-up of Rajchel’s own relationship, and covers Wiccan “handfasting” – monogamous or polyamorous relationships with opposite-sex or same-sex partners – “with the same gravitas associated with the word ‘wedding’, no matter how long the intended handfasting”. Rajchel writes: “When a non-sanctioned marriage ends, the people involved need as much care as those who experience a legal divorce.”



Also shortlisted for this year’s award are Sandra Tsing Loh’s menopause memoir The Madwoman in the Volvo: My Year of Raging Hormones, Ken Thompson’s Where Do Camels Belong? an investigation into invasive species, and Strangers Have the Best Candy, in which Margaret Meps Schulte lays out her experiences of talking to people she didn’t know. Melissa Margaret Schneider’s The Ugly Wife Is a Treasure at Home, which collects stories of love and marriage from communist China.

The Bookseller’s diarist Horace Bent immediately put forth Advanced Pavement Research as a frontrunner, pointing to its “echoes of winners past”, such as Highlights in the History of Concrete, which took the prize in 1994, and Designing High-Performance Stiffened Structures, which won in 2000.

Tom Tivnan, the Diagram prize co-ordinator and features editor of the Bookseller, said the shortlist featured titles “that are unparalleled in their oddity”.

“The past year has been a bumper one for the peculiar, especially in the areas of relationships and science,” added Tivnan. “Nature’s Nether Regions is a long-overdue look at the genitals of birds and bees (and everything in between), while Where Do Camels Belong? is the existential question which has plagued philosophers for centuries. Along with its real-life applications for those who have loved and lost in the Wiccan community, Divorcing a Real Witch could also serve as a guidebook for Harry Potter fan-fiction writers who are focusing on the statistically inevitable end of the marriage of Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley.”

The winner will be decided by public vote on the Bookseller’s sister site, We Love This Book, to be announced on 27 March. There is no prize for the victorious title, although the nominator of the winning entry traditionally receives a “passable bottle of claret”, said the magazine.

The Diagram prize was created in 1978, when Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice took top honours. Other notable victors include Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers (1996) and The Big Book of Lesbian Horse Stories (2003).