Award Winners

Best Women's Prize for Fiction Winners — 12 Essential Novels

The Women's Prize for Fiction (known as the Orange Prize 1996–2012, the Bailey's Women's Prize 2014–2017, and the Women's Prize since 2018) was founded in 1996 after the 1991 Booker Prize shortlist contained no women. It is open to any woman writing in English, regardless of nationality, and has an exceptional record of identifying important novels: Half of a Yellow Sun, Small Island, The Handmaid's Tale (in a special anniversary award), Hamnet, and Demon Copperhead have all won. These twelve are the essential winners.

Founded 1996

Fiction by women

12 essential winners

The Women's Prize: What to Know

The prize was founded directly in response to the 1991 Booker shortlist, which contained no women — despite a year in which Angela Carter, Michèle Roberts, and others had published significant novels. The founding committee included Carmen Callil, Kate Mosse, and Helena Kennedy. Its existence remains controversial in some quarters (some argue it ghettoises women's writing); its record argues back.
The Women's Prize has a strong record with debut and early-career novelists: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie won with her second novel, Maggie O'Farrell with her seventh. The prize has been particularly good at identifying African writers — Adichie, NoViolet Bulawayo, Oyinkan Braithwaite — before the international literary establishment fully acknowledged them.
The "Best of the Best" — the Baileys Women's Prize of Prizes, awarded in 2008 to mark the prize's first decade — went to Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, chosen from all previous winners by public vote. The second "Prize of Prizes" (2021) went to Small Island by Andrea Levy.
Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale won a special 25th anniversary "Winner of Winners" award in 2021, having first been published in 1985 (before the prize existed). The novel was judged against all previous winners — a testament to its endurance and the prize's sense of history.

The Landmark Winners

Pick #1

A Spell of Winter

Helen Dunmore · 1996 · Inaugural Winner

Inaugural winner Incest Edwardian England

Two siblings — Catherine and Rob — are left by their parents with their grandfather and grow up in an Edwardian country house with a disturbing intimacy that eventually becomes incestuous. Dunmore's prose is exceptional — she was primarily a poet and it shows — and her treatment of forbidden desire is neither sensationalist nor evasive. The inaugural Women's Prize winner established the prize's ambition immediately: this is not comfortable reading, and it is not trying to be. Dunmore remained one of the most important British novelists until her death in 2017.

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Pick #2

Small Island

Andrea Levy · 2004 · Winner & Prize of Prizes (2021)

Windrush generation Prize of Prizes Post-war Britain

1948: Hortense and Gilbert, a Jamaican couple, arrive in London as part of the Windrush generation — invited to Britain, greeted with racism and suspicion. They lodge with Queenie, a white woman whose husband hasn't returned from the war. Levy's novel is told in multiple voices moving between Jamaica, Britain, and India during WWII, building toward a portrait of how modern multicultural Britain was actually made. It won the Women's Prize in 2004, the Orange Prize of Prizes in 2021, and remains the definitive novel of the Windrush generation.

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Pick #3

Half of a Yellow Sun

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie · 2007 · Winner & Best of the Best (2008)

Nigerian Civil War Biafra Best of the Best

The Nigerian Civil War (1967–70) and the attempted secession of Biafra, told through three characters: Ugwu, a houseboy from a rural village; Olanna, the educated daughter of a Lagos businessman; and Richard, a British writer in love with Olanna's twin sister. Adichie's novel is the best work of fiction about a conflict that killed a million people through starvation and that the West largely ignored. It won the Women's Prize in 2007 and was voted the "Best of the Best" by public poll in 2008. Adichie is also the author of We Should All Be Feminists (2014).

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Pick #4

The Idea of Perfection

Kate Grenville · 2001 · Winner

Rural Australia Late love Comedy

Two lonely, awkward, middle-aged people — Harley, a heritage architect sent to assess a dilapidated bridge in a small Australian town, and Douglas, an engineer who has made a mess of his life — circle each other with a mutual clumsiness that is both funny and moving. Grenville's novel is the Women's Prize's great comic entry: it laughs at its characters while loving them. The Australian outback setting is rendered with the same tactile specificity as the human relationships. An underrated winner that rewards readers who find the better-known entries too solemn.

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Modern Winners

Pick #5

The Handmaid's Tale

Margaret Atwood · Winner of Winners (2021)

Dystopia Winner of Winners Gilead

Gilead has replaced the United States. Women have been stripped of all rights: they cannot own property, read, or hold employment. Offred is a Handmaid — a fertile woman assigned to a Commander whose job is to produce children for him and his wife. Atwood's 1985 novel predates the Women's Prize but was awarded its "Winner of Winners" in 2021 as the best novel by a woman from the past 25 years, voted for by the public. The novel has sold over eight million copies; the television adaptation has introduced it to a new generation. It is not allegory — every atrocity in it is drawn from historical precedent.

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Pick #6

How to Be Both

Ali Smith · 2015 · Winner

Renaissance painter Two halves in random order Grief

A grieving teenage girl in contemporary Cambridge; a Renaissance painter (possibly Francesco del Cossa) observing the contemporary world from a mysterious vantage point. Smith's novel was published in two versions — half the print run has the painter's section first, half has the teenager's section first — creating a genuinely different reading experience depending on which copy you have. The conceit is not gimmick: the novel is about how we see (the painter's frescoes, the girl's CCTV footage, the reader's version of the text) and whether order matters to meaning. Won the Women's Prize and the Goldsmiths Prize in 2015.

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Pick #7

The Power

Naomi Alderman · 2017 · Winner

Speculative fiction Women develop electricity Power reversal

Women develop the ability to deliver electric shocks — and the world's power structures invert almost immediately. Alderman's speculative novel is not utopia: it is a mirror. The question it poses is not "wouldn't the world be better if women were in charge?" but "is power inherently corrupting regardless of who holds it?" The answer is argued through four interconnected characters across a decade of world-historical change. Atwood, who mentored Alderman through the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative, called it "brilliant, horrifying and altogether too topical."

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Pick #8

Hamnet

Maggie O'Farrell · 2020 · Winner

Shakespeare's son Grief Elizabethan England

Shakespeare's eleven-year-old son Hamnet dies of plague in 1596. His wife Agnes (not Anne — O'Farrell insists on the name Hamnet knew) is the novel's centre: a herbalist and seer with an unusual relationship to the world, trying to understand why her son died and how her husband transforms that death into a play. O'Farrell refuses to name Shakespeare directly throughout; he is "the husband," "the Latin tutor," "the man in London." The grief at the novel's centre is utterly convincing, and the final scene — Agnes watching Hamlet for the first time — is devastating.

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Recent Winners

Pick #9

The Song of Achilles

Madeline Miller · 2012 · Winner

Ancient Greece Achilles & Patroclus Debut novel

The Trojan War retold from Patroclus's perspective — his love for Achilles from boyhood to death. Miller spent ten years on her debut, and the care is evident in every sentence: the Greek world is rendered with extraordinary tactile specificity, and the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus is the most fully realised queer love story in recent mythological fiction. It won the Women's Prize in 2012 and has sold millions of copies, becoming the novel that introduced a generation of readers to literary retellings of ancient myth. Miller's second novel, Circe (2018), consolidated her reputation.

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Pick #10

Transcendent Kingdom

Yaa Gyasi · 2021 · Shortlisted

Shortlisted Opioid addiction Science vs. faith

Gifty is a PhD student in neuroscience at Stanford, studying addiction and depression in mice. Her mother lies catatonic with depression in her apartment. Her brother Nana died of a heroin overdose. Gyasi's second novel (after the acclaimed Homegoing) is a quieter, more interior book — a study of a woman trying to reconcile the faith of her Ghanaian immigrant family with the scientific materialism of her training, and the grief that makes both inadequate. Shortlisted for the Women's Prize in 2021, it is one of the most thoughtful American novels about addiction and the limits of rationalism.

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Pick #11

Burnt Sugar

Avni Doshi · 2021 · Shortlisted (also Booker shortlisted)

India Mother-daughter Unsparing

A woman in Pune watches her mother's memory deteriorate while caring for her with a resentment she cannot suppress and will not pretend to. Doshi's debut is one of the most uncomfortable novels about maternal ambivalence in recent fiction: the narrator is not sympathetic, the mother is not sympathetic, and the novel refuses to resolve the tension between them. Shortlisted for both the Women's Prize and the Booker Prize in 2021, it is one of the few debut novels to achieve this double shortlisting. The prose is cold and exact — deliberately so.

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Pick #12

Demon Copperhead

Barbara Kingsolver · 2023 · Winner

Pulitzer & Women's Prize Appalachia Opioid crisis

David Copperfield retold in the Appalachian opioid epidemic — Demon is a boy born into poverty and addiction who survives the foster care system, becomes a high school football star, and then falls into prescription opioid addiction. Kingsolver's novel won both the Pulitzer Prize and the Women's Prize in 2023 — a rare double that reflects the novel's ambition and achievement. The parallels with Dickens are exact and illuminating: rural Appalachia abandoned by America's economic shifts maps onto the industrial slums of Victorian England. A Dickensian novel in the best sense — angry, empathetic, and compulsively readable.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Why does the Women's Prize exist if books are judged without regard to the author's gender?

The practical answer is that the 1991 Booker shortlist contained no women, despite a year in which significant novels by women were published. The prize was founded to address structural bias in how literary culture evaluates and promotes fiction by women. In the years since, studies have consistently shown that novels by women receive less review coverage, smaller advances, and are less likely to win major awards in proportion to their share of the market. The prize's record — Half of a Yellow Sun, Small Island, Hamnet, Demon Copperhead — argues that it has identified important novels that might otherwise have been overlooked.

Which Women's Prize winners are most accessible to general readers?

The Song of Achilles (Miller) is the most immediately pleasurable — it reads like a page-turner despite being literary fiction about ancient Greece. Hamnet (O'Farrell) is the other easy recommendation: historical fiction about grief, written with beauty and emotional clarity. Demon Copperhead (Kingsolver) is the most page-turning of the recent winners — structured like a Victorian novel, it drives forward. Half of a Yellow Sun (Adichie) requires patience for the historical context but repays it hugely. The Handmaid's Tale is easy to read quickly but deserves slow reading. Small Island is the best novel for readers who want to understand modern British history through fiction.

Have any authors won the Women's Prize more than once?

No author has won the main prize twice. However, several have been shortlisted multiple times: Lionel Shriver (We Need to Talk About Kevin won in 2005), Ali Smith, and Maggie O'Farrell (shortlisted multiple times before winning with Hamnet in 2020). The prize has a tradition of rewarding authors who have been shortlisted several times before winning — a recognition of cumulative achievement rather than just the individual book.