The ME team attend the Women's Prize Readings and Party
On Wednesday, the ME team went to the live readings of the Women’s Prize after work. Our authors had been there the whole day, attending panels and “enjoying” the June English weather. Abigail Dean, bestselling author of Girl A, and Stacey Halls, bestselling author and winner of the Women’s Prize Futures award, spoke in the Futures fiction panel. Stacey also workshopped how to research for historical novels in Researching Your Novel with Stacey Halls.
Hearing a novel being narrated by the own author is a very special thing. The Trust organised a lovely evening with all the shortlisted authors reading a section of their works, and short interviews for the audience to know more about these nominated books. Needless to say, we wanted to read them all by the end of the evening.
Yesterday was finally the day when the winners were announced – the 29th winner of the Fiction Prize and the 1st ever winner of the Non-Fiction Prize. As you will know by now, the winners were V. V. Ganeshananthan with BROTHERLESS NIGHT and Naomi Klein with DOPPELGANGER. The speeches were heartfelt and nuanced, and the company couldn’t have been better. There were some Bailey’s cocktails, champagne, spritz and wine to combat the drizzle.
We are now going to be very busy reading the shortlists (and longlists) before the new ones drop!
The Women's Prize for Fiction (previously the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction) was established in 1996 to recognise women writers – partially in response to the Booker shortlist in 1991 being entirely male. 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. The Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction was awarded for the first time in 2024.
