In 1991 the Booker Prize shortlist contained six novels and not one of them was written by a woman, in a year when women had written well over half the fiction published in Britain. A group of writers, editors, and booksellers looked at that omission, and at the research confirming it was no accident, and decided to build a prize that could not overlook what the others kept missing. Five years later the first award was given, and the Women’s Prize for Fiction has since become one of the most trusted names in the English-language novel, a yearly argument that the best writing by women deserves a stage of its own.

This page holds every winner, from Helen Dunmore in 1996 to Yael van der Wouden in 2025, along with the story of how the prize came to be, the debate it has always provoked, and the winning novels most worth a reader’s time. Its list of laureates is strikingly international, reaching from Nigeria to Jamaica to Sri Lanka by way of the United States and Britain, and it is one of the best guides we have to the range of women writing in English today. It sits within our guide to the most prestigious literary awards in the world, and it makes a natural companion to the Booker Prize that inspired it.

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What the Women’s Prize for Fiction Honors

The prize is awarded each year to a woman of any nationality for the best full-length novel written in English and published in the United Kingdom in the previous year. The winner receives thirty thousand pounds and a bronze figurine called the Bessie, and the choice is made by a panel of five women drawn from writing, criticism, and public life. Unlike the Booker or the Pulitzer, it sets no bar of nationality, which is why its roll of honor ranges so widely across the English-speaking world.

The award has carried several names in its lifetime, a reflection of its changing sponsors rather than its purpose. It began as the Orange Prize for Fiction, the name most readers still half-remember, held that title from 1996 to 2012, spent the Baileys years from 2014 to 2017 under a liquor label, and settled at last, in 2018, into the plain and permanent Women’s Prize for Fiction. Through every rebranding its aim has held steady: to correct, one year at a time, a historical imbalance in how women’s writing is judged and remembered.

The Most Recent Winner

The 2025 Women’s Prize for Fiction was awarded to Yael van der Wouden for her debut novel The Safekeep, a taut and sensual story of suspicion and desire set in the Dutch countryside in the aftermath of the Second World War. That a first novel could take the prize is a reminder of the award’s long willingness to crown new voices.

It follows two accomplished recent winners. The 2024 prize went to V. V. Ganeshananthan’s Brotherless Night, set amid the Sri Lankan civil war, and the 2023 award to Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead, which also won the Pulitzer that year. This section is updated each June, when the new winner is announced.

The Complete List of Women’s Prize for Fiction Winners

The record below runs most recent first. The award was known as the Orange Prize for Fiction from 1996 to 2012 and the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction from 2014 to 2017.

2020s

2010s

2000s

1990s

Where to Start: The Best Women’s Prize-Winning Novels

Three decades of winners make a rich and unusually varied shelf, and because the prize takes writers from everywhere that English is written, its best books carry the reader around the world. A few are essential.

Begin with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun, later voted the finest winner in the prize’s history, which tells the story of the Biafran war through a handful of unforgettable lives and stands as the essential novel of modern Nigeria. Andrea Levy’s Small Island, itself once named the best of the prize’s first decade, brings the Windrush generation to life with warmth and unsparing honesty. For the reader who wants a modern myth, Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles retells the Iliad as a love story and made an ancient tragedy feel newly urgent.

The prize has been at its boldest in recent years. Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet imagines the death of Shakespeare’s son and the grief that may have made a masterpiece, and Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi is a strange and beautiful puzzle of a novel, unlike anything else in contemporary fiction. Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire transplants the story of Antigone into a British Muslim family torn apart by the state, and Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead, the double winner of this prize and the Pulitzer, remakes Dickens in the ravaged hill country of the American opioid crisis. For more of the world these writers open, our guide to award-winning books gathers the best from every major prize.

The Argument the Prize Has Always Provoked

No award has been asked to justify its existence so often, because a prize open only to women invites the obvious objection, and it has drawn that objection from the start. The novelist A. S. Byatt refused to allow her work to be considered, calling a women-only prize sexist and unnecessary, and critics over the years have echoed her, arguing that literary merit should know no gender. Against them stand the plain facts of the prize’s origin, the shortlists and surveys that showed women’s fiction being quietly and consistently overlooked, and the reply of writers like Cynthia Ozick, who concluded that the republic of letters was never innocent on this question and that, for readers and writers alike, the more prizes the better. The honest reader can hold both thoughts at once, that in an ideal world such a prize would be unnecessary, and that we do not yet live in that world. More recently the award has faced harder questions about who counts as eligible, as debates over gender and identity have reached its rules, a sign that the very category it was built to defend is now itself contested ground.

A Stage of Their Own

Return, at the end, to that Booker shortlist of 1991 and the absence that started everything. The Women’s Prize was founded on a simple and stubborn conviction, that attention is not neutral, that it flows more easily to some writers than others, and that a good prize can redirect it. Whether such correction should still be necessary is a fair question, and the list above is the best answer the prize can give, three decades of novels that might otherwise have been read a little less, remembered a little less, and are instead handed to us here, gathered and lit. The winners are an invitation to notice what the other prizes have sometimes been slow to see.