The Women's Prize for Fiction (formerly Bailey's Women's Prize for Fiction and the Orange Prize for Fiction)

Launched in 1996, the prize celebrates excellence, originality and accessibility in women's writing from throughout the world.

The winner receives a cheque for £30,000 and a limited edition bronze known as a 'Bessie', created by the artist Grizel Niven.

• About the Prize
• Previous Winners

2018 Winner

Home fire

by Kamila Shamsie

A suspenseful and heartbreaking story of a family ripped apart by secrets and driven to pit love against loyalty, with devastating consequences. What sacrifices will be made in the name of love?

2017 Winner

The Power

by Naomi Alderman

What if women developed the ability to release electrical jolts through their fingers which can inflict agonising pain and even death? With this single twist the four teenage girls at the heart of the story are utterly transformed and we look at the world in an entirely new light. What if the power to hurt were in women's hands?

2016 Winner

The Glorious Heresies

by Lisa McInerney

One messy murder affects the lives of five misfits who exist on the fringes of Ireland's post-crash society. Ryan is a 15-year old drug dealer desperate not to turn out like his alcoholic father Tony, whose obsession with his unhinged neighbour threatens to ruin him and his family.

2015 Winner

How to be Both

by Ali Smith

Shami Chakrabarti, Chair of the Judges said of Smith's winning novel "ancient and modern meet and speak to each other in this tender, brilliant and witty novel of grief, love, sexuality and shape-shifting identity."

2014 Winner

A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing

by Eimear McBride

This ambitious first novel tells the story of a young woman's relationship with her brother and the long shadow cast by his childhood brain tumour.

2013 Winner

May We be Forgiven

by A.M. Holmes

Feeling overshadowed by his more successful younger brother, Harold is shocked by his brother's violent act that irrevocably changes their lives. An amusing, dark exploration of the tarnished American dream.

2012 Winner

The Song of Achilles

by Madeleine Miller

Greece in the age of Heroes. Exiled prince Patroclus and the strong and beautiful Achilles grow into young men skilled in the arts of war and medicine. When Helen of Sparta is kidnapped they travel to Troy, little knowing that the years that follow will test everything they hold dear.

2011 Winner

The Tiger's Wife

by Téa Obreht  

A young doctor gradually unravels the mystery of her grandfather's death through stories of magical legend.

2010 Winner

Lacuna

by Barbara Kingslover

The story of Harrison William Shepherd, a man caught between two worlds - Mexico and the United States in the 1930s, '40s, and '50s - whose search for identity takes readers to the heart of the twentieth century's most tumultuous events.

2009 Winner

Home

by Marilynne Robinson

This novel chronicles the life of the Boughton family, in particular the father, Reverend Robert Boughton; and Glory and Jack, two of Robert's adult children who return home to Gilead, Iowa.

Request this item