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.
