Women's Prize for Fiction


The Women's Prize for Fiction, Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction and Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction ) is one of the United Kingdom's most prestigious literary prizes. It is awarded annually to a female author of any nationality for the best original full-length novel written in English and published in the United Kingdom in the preceding year.

History

The prize was established to recognise the literary achievement of female writers. The inspiration for the Baileys Prize was the Booker Prize of 1991, when none of the six shortlisted books was by a woman, despite some 60% of novels published that year being by female authors. A group of women and men working in the industry – authors, publishers, agents, booksellers, librarians, journalists – therefore met to discuss the issue. Research showed that women’s literary achievements were often not acknowledged by the major literary prizes.
The winner of the prize receives £30,000, along with a bronze sculpture called the Bessie created by artist Grizel Niven, the sister of actor and writer David Niven. Typically, a longlist of nominees is announced around March each year, followed by a shortlist in June; within days the winner is announced. The winner is selected by a board of "five leading women" each year.
The prize has "spawned" several sub-category competitions and awards: the Harper's Bazaar Broadband Short Story Competition, the Orange Award for New Writers, the Penguin/Orange Readers' Group Prize, and the Reading Book Group of the Year.
In support of the 2004 award, the Orange Prize for Fiction published a list of 50 contemporary "essential reads". The books were chosen by a sample of 500 people attending the Guardian Hay Festival and represent the audience's "must have" books by living UK writers. The list is called the Orange Prize for Fiction's "50 Essential Reads by Contemporary Authors".
The prize was originally sponsored by Orange, a telecommunications company. In May 2012, it was announced Orange would be ending its corporate sponsorship of the prize. There was no corporate sponsor for 2013; sponsorship was by "private benefactors", led by Cherie Blair and writers Joanna Trollope and Elizabeth Buchan.
Beginning in 2014, the prize was sponsored by the liquor brand Baileys Irish Cream, owned by the drinks conglomerate Diageo. In January 2017, Diageo announced that it had "regretfully decided to make way for a new sponsor"; the 2017 prize to be announced in June, will be the last it supports.
In June 2017, the prize announced it would change its name to simply "Women's Prize for Fiction" starting in 2018, and will be supported by a family of sponsors.

Winners and shortlisted writers

The winner of the most recent, 2019 Women's Prize for Fiction was Tayari Jones for her book An American Marriage.

#ThisBook

In May 2014, Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction launched the #ThisBook campaign to find out which books, written by women, have had the biggest impact on readers. Nineteen "inspirational women" were chosen to launch the campaign and then thousands of people from the "general public" submitted their ideas via Twitter. The 20 winners were announced 29 July 2014. The organisers noted that over half the winning books were published before 1960.
  1. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
  2. The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood
  3. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
  4. Harry Potter, J. K. Rowling
  5. Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
  6. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
  7. Rebecca, Daphne Du Maurier
  8. Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
  9. The Secret History, Donna Tartt
  10. I Capture The Castle, Dodie Smith
  11. The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
  12. Beloved, Toni Morrison
  13. Gone With The Wind, Margaret Mitchell
  14. We Need to Talk About Kevin, Lionel Shriver
  15. The Time Traveller's Wife, Audrey Niffenegger
  16. Middlemarch, George Eliot
  17. I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou
  18. The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing
  19. The Color Purple, Alice Walker
  20. The Women's Room, Marilyn French

    Criticism

The fact that the prize excludes male writers has provoked comment. After the prize was founded, Auberon Waugh nicknamed it the "Lemon Prize," while Germaine Greer said there would soon be a prize for "writers with red hair". A. S. Byatt, who won the 1990 Man Booker Prize, said it was a "sexist prize", claiming "such a prize was never needed". She refused to have her work considered for this prize. In 2007, former editor of The Times Simon Jenkins called the prize "sexist". In 2008, writer Tim Lott said, "the Orange Prize is sexist and discriminatory, and it should be shunned".
On the other hand, in 2011 London journalist Jean Hannah Edelstein wrote about her own "wrong reasons" for supporting the prize:
Unfortunately, the evidence shows that the experiences of male and female writers after they set their pens down are often distinctively different. That's why I've changed my mind about the Orange prize. I still agree with Byatt that the idea of female-specific subject matter is spurious, but I don't think that's what the prize rewards.
In 2012 Cynthia Ozick, writing in The New York Times, said the Prize "was not born into an innocent republic of letters" when it comes to a history of women writers being discriminated against. She concluded, "For readers and writers, in sum, the more prizes the better, however they are structured, and philosophy be damned."
In 1999 Lola Young, chair of the judges' panel, claimed that British female literature fell into two categories, either "insular and parochial" or "domestic in a piddling kind of way". Linda Grant suffered accusations of plagiarism following her award in 2000. In 2001 a panel of male critics strongly criticised the Orange shortlist and produced its own. In 2007, broadcaster Muriel Gray, chair of the panel, said that judges had to wade through "a lot of dross" to get to the shortlist, but praised that year's winner, Half of a Yellow Sun by Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, saying, "This is a moving and important book by an incredibly exciting author."