Canadian writer and activist Naomi Klein has won the inaugural Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction for her book Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World. It starts as a tale about what it’s like to be mistaken for somebody else - Klein is often confused with controversial US author Naomi Wolf. The critically acclaimed 2023 work delves into the impact of the digital world - including social media and AI - on our culture, politics and identity.
American author VV Ganeshananthan picked up the Women's Prize for Fiction for her second novel, Brotherless Night, which depicts a family fractured by the Sri Lankan civil war. The winners were announced at a ceremony in central London on Thursday evening. It took Ganeshananthan two decades to write her novel.
She beat the likes of Irish author and Booker Prize winner Anne Enright and Australian author Kate Grenville to the top prize. Ganeshananthan was previously longlisted in 2009 with her debut novel Love Marriage. Chair of the judges for the fiction prize, author Monica Ali, said: "Brotherless Night is a brilliant, compelling and deeply moving novel that bears witness to the intimate and epic-scale tragedies of the Sri Lankan civil war.
"In rich, evocative prose, Ganeshananthan creates a vivid sense of time and place and an indelible cast of characters. "Her commitment to complexity and clear-eyed moral scrutiny combines with spellbinding storytelling to render Brotherless Night a masterpiece of historical fiction." The novel follows.
