Kristina Murkett

Do we really still need a Women’s Prize for Fiction?

Naomi Alderman, winner of the 2017 Women's Prize for Fiction (Getty images)

This year marks the 25th anniversary of the Women’s Prize For Fiction, and there is much to celebrate. Over the last quarter of a century the prize has become one of the most successful awards in the world, and has exposed readers to important, challenging and accomplished works by female authors. There is no doubt that the Prize will go down in the ‘herstory’ books as a force for good. However, with Maggie O’Farrell announced as the 25th winner last night, perhaps it no longer needs to be part of our future.

Much has changed in 25 years. In 1991, when the idea for the Prize was in its early embryonic form, there was not a single female writer in the Booker Prize shortlist, and clearly many female writers were being overlooked.

That is simply not the case now. In the 2020 Booker Prize shortlist, nine out of 13 of the writers are women. In the last ten years, six American female authors have won the National Book Award, while more women have won the Costa Book of the Year than men. Over the last 20 years, the Neustadt International Prize for Literature has been awarded as many times to women as to men. And the last five winners of the Hugo Award For Best Sci-Fi and Fantasy Novel have all been women.

Literature, it seems, is one of the few areas in which women do not need a leg-up. Women dominate the literary market: they write more books than men, they read more books than men. According to Helen Taylor’s Why Women Read Fiction, women account for 80 per cent of fiction sales in the UK, US and Canada. Female writers outsell male ones in many genres, including romance, history and horror fiction.

Of course there is still a long way to go, and we cannot overlook disparities, particularly at the top of the publishing world – a 2018 study

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