What, it has become customary to ask, is the point of the Women’s Prize, which was won this week for the second time by Barbara Kingsolver for her ninth novel Demon Copperhead, a searingly contemporary, Appalachian-flavoured Dickens reboot? Who needs a prize to promote and celebrate female authors when publishing is now overwhelmingly a women’s game, run predominantly by women for women?
Female authors dominate prize lists, bestseller lists, bookshelves and TikTok. In 2021 they were responsible for nearly 80 per cent of sales across the UK, America and Canada. Three of the final five winners of the Costa Book of the Year award (the prize ceased in 2022) were women. So were eight of the 13 longlisted authors for the 2022 Booker. So rare are hot young male authors these days that the recent decennial Granta list, nominating the best 20 writers under 40, managed to find only four of them.
