The award of the Women’s prize for fiction to the American writer Barbara Kingsolver last week is unusual in an awards industry that is always on the lookout for new departures: it is the first time in the prize’s 28-year history that any writer has won it twice. In other regards, however, the Women’s prize is diversifying, with plans to award a sister prize for nonfiction from next year.
To see the logic of this, it’s worth scrolling back. The plan for a fiction prize exclusively for women emerged out of a series of meetings between publishers, authors, agents, booksellers and journalists in the wake of the 1991 Booker shortlist, which featured no women at all. Angela Carter’s joyous final novel, Wise Children, was among those eligible, though sadly this giant of 20th-century literature died too early to benefit from the new award.
The arrival of what was then the Orange prize in 1995 was not universally welcomed: Auberon Waugh nicknamed it the Lemon prize, AS Byatt refused to let her work be entered, and Germaine Greer complained that someone would soon found an award for writers with red hair. The original sponsor, Mitsubishi, was scared off by a newspaper column dismissing it as sexist.
Though there is no room for complacency, the battle for representation of women in fiction has largely been won: the Booker prize shortlist last year had a 50:50 split, while this year’s Granta list of the 20 best writers under 40 included just four men, compared with 14 in its first two vintages of 1983 and 1993.
The contested territory now is nonfiction, in all its variety. On the surface, this doesn’t look as dire as the Booker drought of 1991. The Women’s prize itself calculates that female writers won just over a third of the gongs awarded by seven UK nonfiction prizes over the last 10 years. But the pattern of underrepresentation is repeated across newspaper reviews and book-of-the-year nominations, with a knock-on effect on author earnings.
If you strip out specialisms in which female writers tend to cluster, such as memoir, the picture gets more serious, as the science writer Gaia Vince wrote after becoming the first woman to win the Royal Society’s prize for science books in 2015. Ms Vince tracked the underrepresentation back to the start of the publishing process, where editors, with an eye to what would sell, were less likely to accept manuscripts by women, fearing (wrongly) that men wouldn’t read them.
That five of the seven Royal Society prize winners since Ms Vince have been female might seem like evidence that a new era of equality has already arrived, until you look at the gender split of the shortlists from which they were drawn. Here, male authors dominate by 26 to 16. It’s another version of the old saw that to get through at all, women have to be the best in their field.
This is not just a problem of the sort of writers but the sort of books that get pushed to the front, with a loss to readers of both diversity and perspective. It is exciting to think how many more will make their mark, and from which disciplines – history, politics, sport, or new areas entirely – when given some room of their own.
