With the Women’s Prize set to crown its 29th batch of winners next week, some might wonder whether there’s still a need for such a prize. But a look at our reading habits should leave us in no doubt, writes Anna Moloney When the Women’s Prize for Fiction, then known as the Orange Prize, was established in 1996, not everybody was happy. Journalist and novelist Auberon Waugh, the eldest son of Evelyn Waugh (who had never been given a step up in life) dubbed it the “Lemon Prize”; prominent literary critic A.
S. Byatt, who refused to have her novels considered for the award, said it was sexist; and Germaine Greer, a major if controversial second wave feminist, scorned that it wouldn’t be too long before there was a prize for “writers with red hair”. Such special treatment, they finger-wagged, was patronising and unnecessary.
And if recent hot-take pieces on the prize are anything to go by, there is a significant number who still believe the same thing. “Well that’s a charming idea!” renowned historian, and chair of this year’s inaugural Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction, Suzannah Lipscomb tells me, when I put to her that some think there is no longer need for the prize. “Unfortunately it is not true.
” And it’s hard to disagree. The creation of the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction, awarded for the first time this year, hopes to act as a step towards closing the “authority gap”, a term coined by Mary Ann Sieghart, whose 2021 book gave evidence to a lon.