Women's Prize
for Fiction 2023

Discover the stories that have captivated the judges this year

2024

2023

2022

2021

Winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2023

'Brilliant and visceral, Demon Copperhead is storytelling by an author at the top of her game. We were all deeply moved by Demon, his gentle optimism, resilience and determination despite everything being set against him.'

'An exposé of modern America, its opioid crisis and the detrimental treatment of deprived and maligned communities, Demon Copperhead tackles universal themes – from addiction and poverty, to family, love, and the power of friendship and art – it packs a triumphant emotional punch, and is a novel that will withstand the test of time.' - Louise Minchin, 2023 Chair of Judges.

Demon Copperhead

Barbara Kingsolver

The 2023 shortlist

Fire Rush

In London, 1978, Yamaye dreams of being a DJ and MC but after meeting Moose so starts a dramatic journey of transformation.

Trespasses

Tender and shocking, Trespasses is an unforgettable debut of people trying to live ordinary lives in extraordinary times.

Demon Copperhead

Suffused with truth, anger and compassion, Demon Copperhead is an epic tale of love, loss and everything in between.

Black Butterflies

Inspired by real-life accounts of the longest siege in modern warfare, only thirty years ago, Black Butterflies is a breathtaking portrait of disintegration, resilience and hope.

The Marriage Portrait

The Marriage Portrait is an unforgettable reimagining of the life of a young woman whose proximity to power places her in mortal danger.

Pod

An immersive and transformative story of an ocean world and its extraordinary creatures increasingly haunted by the cruelty and ignorance of the human race.

In their own words... the shortlisted authors tell us about their stories

Jacqueline Crooks on Fire Rush

Your novel in one sentence...
The quest of a woman within the male-dominated dub-reggae underworld to use supra-watt dub music power to find sites of safety for her mind and body.

What inspired you to write your shortlisted book?
The dub reggae sound revolution of the 1970s and 1980s was an important moment in time, and the culture of that world continues to reverberate, impacting on the fashion, music, and language of today. It was a hidden subterranean world and it struck me that many people didn't know of its existence. I wanted to explore through writing the politics of invisibility and was compelled to write about this hidden world, to recreate it from memory and imagination.

Fire Rush

Jacqueline Crooks

Louise Kennedy on Trespasses

Your novel in one sentence...
Trespasses is a star-crossed love story set in a small town near Belfast in 1975, at the height of the time known as The Troubles.

What inspired you to write your shortlisted book?
*A visit to the Ulster Museum in 2015 made me think about how art can express the unspeakable in a place where language is fraught. I made a ghost of The Troubles in my head and imagined a life for him.

Trespasses

Louise Kennedy

Barbara Kingsolver on Demon Copperhead

Your novel in one sentence...
This is one boy's journey of survival, but it's also the story of the impoverished, generationally exploited, heartbreakingly beautiful place where I live, America's southern Appalachian mountains.

What inspired you to write your shortlisted book?
If my culture and people show up at all in books, movies, or television, we're portrayed as ignorant, hillbillies. I wanted to represent my home with the respect and compassion it deserves.

Demon Copperhead

Barbara Kingsolver

Priscilla Morris on Black Butterflies

Your novel in one sentence...
The siege of Sarajevo (1992-96) as seen through the eyes of Zora, a resilient artist and teacher who sends her family to safety in England before being trapped in her blockaded hometown for ten months.

What inspired you to write your shortlisted book?
Black Butterflies is my personal response to the war that devastated my mother's hometown of Sarajevo. The desire to understand the war, a love for the place where I'd spent childhood summers, and family stories of resilience, loss and survival inspired me. In particular, I was inspired by the stories of my great-uncle's loss of his art studio during the war. The image that was the catalyst for the writing of the novel was that of flames billowing through the windows of the Bosnian National Library, where my great-uncle had his studio. The charred pages of books floated over Sarajevo for days afterwards and people called them 'black butterflies'.

Black Butterflies

Priscilla Morris

Maggie O’Farrell on The Marriage Portrait

Your novel in one sentence...
The Marriage Portrait is the story of Lucrezia, a young Duchess in sixteenth-century Ferrara, who realises that her husband is planning to murder her.

What inspired you to write your shortlisted book?
I had the idea just before lockdown began, at the tailend of winter in 2020. I had been rereading Robert Browning's dramatic monologues and I was idly wondering to myself one day whether Browning had based his most famous, My Last Duchess, on real events. I started researching the source of his inspiration and, within minutes, I was staring at a portrait of a young girl, married off at 15, with auburn hair and a rather frightened gaze. I knew instantly that I would write a novel about her.

The Marriage Portrait

Maggie O'Farrell

Laline Paull on Pod

Your novel in one sentence...
A science-backed dolphin epic of migration, love, loss, family and survival – with many characters of other species all just trying to stay alive in a changing ocean.

What inspired you to write your shortlisted book?
Stupid naive tourist contact swimming with wild dolphins, then realising my blunder and starting to research why one species had driven out another (answer: an oil spill up the coast).

Pod

Laline Paull

The 2023 longlist

Glory

In an exhilarating ride filled with magical realism, NoViolet Bulawayo's Booker Prize shortlisted Glory tells the story of a country seemingly trapped in a cycle as old as time.

Children of Paradise

Amid a sense of foreboding, our protagonist Holly is drawn into a group of misfits when she starts work at an old cinema. An unsettling tale tackling themes such as isolation and capitalism.

Stone Blind

Natalie Haynes brings the infamous Medusa to life in a story of how a young woman became a monster. And how she was never really a monster at all.

Cursed Bread

The Booker-nominated author of The Water Cure and Blue Ticket shares a chilling feminist fable, based on the true story of an unsolved historical mystery...

The Dog of the North

In this dry, darkly comic novel Penny sets out in a van to find a way through the curveballs life has thrown at her and in doing so, find a way back to herself.

I'm a Fan

Sheena Patel makes startling connections between power struggles at the heart of human relationships to those in the wider world.

Wandering Souls

Cecile Pin's debut novel explores the bonds that connect people through even distance or death.

The Bandit Queens

With darkly irreverent and fresh prose, this unforgettable feminist revenge thriller acknowledges the unfortunate status quo for women everywhere.

Memphis

A spellbinding ode to Memphis, as well as a celebration of the strength and defiance of three generations of a Southern Black family who live there.

Homesick

A coming-of-age story, Homesick is about learning to love language in its many forms, healing through words and the promises and perils of empathy and sisterhood.

Not yet available in audio

Meet the judges

Louise Minchin - Chair

Louise Minchin is a journalist, broadcaster and writer. She was a presenter on BBC Breakfast for 20 years and was the main news anchor on the BBC News Channel and the BBC’s One O’clock News. She has also presented The One Show, Five Live Drive, Real Rescues and Missing Live and has been a contestant on I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here, Time Crashers and Celebrity MasterChef. She is also a writer. Her first book, Dare to Tri, charted her journey from the Breakfast sofa to representing the Great Britain Triathlon team in her age-group at World and European Championships. Her second book, Fearless, which will be published by Bloomsbury in 2023, will also reflect her passion for celebrating women’s extraordinary stories.

Rachel Joyce

Rachel Joyce is an award-winning novelist and playwright. Following a 20-year career creating radio drama, she wrote the Sunday Times and international best sellers The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry and The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy. Her latest novel, Maureen Fry and the Angel of the North, completes the trilogy. Rachel is also the author of Perfect, The Music Shop, Miss Benson’s Beetle and a collection of interlinked short stories, A Snow Garden & Other Stories. Her books have sold over 5 million copies worldwide and been translated into thirty-six languages. The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Prize and longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. It is now a major film, starring Jim Broadbent and due for screening in 2023, for which Rachel wrote the screenplay. She was also awarded the Specsavers National Book Awards New Writer of the Year in 2012 and shortlisted for UK Author of the Year 2014.

Bella Mackie

Bella Mackie is a writer and journalist, she has written for the Guardian, The Times and Vice and has a column in bi-monthly column in Vogue. She is the author of two bestselling books: Jog On, a memoir about running and mental health published in 2018, and her number one bestselling novel, How to Kill Your Family, which came out in 2021.

Irenosen Okojie

Irenosen Okojie is a Nigerian British author whose work pushes the boundaries of form, language, and ideas. Her novel Butterfly Fish, and short story collections, Speak Gigantular and Nudibranch, have won and been nominated for multiple awards. Her journalism has been featured in the New York Times, Observer, Guardian and Huffington Post and she is a Contributing Editor for the White Review. She co-presents the BBC's Turn Up For The Books podcast alongside Simon Savidge and Bastille frontman, Dan Smith. She has also judged various literary prizes including the Dylan Thomas Prize, The Gordon Burn Prize as well as the BBC National Short Story Award. Vice Chair of the Royal Society of Literature, she was awarded an MBE For Services To Literature in 2021.

Tulip Siddiq

Tulip Siddiq is the Member of Parliament for Hampstead and Kilburn. She is the Shadow Economic Secretary to the Treasury and was previously Shadow Minister for Children and Early Years. Tulip has successfully worked to change legislation to make free prenatal testing a routine part of antenatal care, to improve access to justice by overturning the criminal courts charge and to ensure that free school meals were provided in the school holidays during the Covid-19 crisis. Tulip brought in a Ten Minute Rule Bill to make flexible working the default after the pandemic in order to improve the lives of working parents. She fought for six years to bring her constituent, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, back to the UK after she was illegally detained in Iran in 2016. Tulip is also a primary school governor, a trustee of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust and a patron of Leaders Plus, which supports mothers in their careers and serves on the board of Good Chance theatre.

Make a discovery...

Introducing Sui Annukka

Not even a year after winning the 2022 Women’s Prize for Fiction Discoveries programme Sui Annukka will release her novella, The Mother Sun. Sui submitted the start of a novel as her entry to the development programme before taking advantage of the courses and workshops made available through Audible, Curtis Brown Literary Agency, and the Curtis Brown Creative writing school to create a new story for Audible.

Following lead character Surya as she visits London from Sri Lanka, we discover she is not only recovering from tragedy but is also fixated on a long-buried, shameful episode from her past. Exploring themes of grief, guilt, loss and hope The Mother Sun is released on 25 May.

The Mother Sun

Sui Annukka

Vick Hope interviews inspirational guests

Bookshelfie: Women’s Prize Podcast

By: Women’s Prize Podcast/ Bird Lime Media

Length: Not Yet Known

Original Recording

4.5 out of 5 stars 4.5 (2 ratings)

Listen now

The Book of Form and Emptiness

By: Ruth Ozeki

Narrated by: Kerry Shale, Ruth Ozeki

Length: 18 hrs and 53 mins

Release date: 23-09-21

Language: English

4.5 out of 5 stars 620 ratings
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Piranesi

By: Susanna Clarke

Narrated by: Chiwetel Ejiofor

Length: 6 hrs and 58 mins

Release date: 15-09-20

Language: English

4.5 out of 5 stars 5,347 ratings
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Hamnet

Winner of The Women's Prize for Fiction 2020 - the No. 1 Bestseller

By: Maggie O'Farrell

Narrated by: Daisy Donovan

Length: 10 hrs and 31 mins

Release date: 31-03-20

Language: English

4.5 out of 5 stars 5,996 ratings
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An American Marriage (Oprah’s Book Club)

A Novel

By: Tayari Jones

Narrated by: Sean Crisden, Eisa Davis

Length: 8 hrs and 59 mins

Release date: 06-02-18

Language: English

4.5 out of 5 stars 2,272 ratings
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Home Fire

By: Kamila Shamsie

Narrated by: Tania Rodrigues

Length: 7 hrs and 54 mins

Release date: 21-12-17

Language: English

4.5 out of 5 stars 974 ratings
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The Power

By: Naomi Alderman

Narrated by: Adjoa Andoh, Naomi Alderman, Thomas Judd, Emma Fenney, Phil Nightingale

Length: 12 hrs and 4 mins

Release date: 27-10-16

Language: English

4.5 out of 5 stars 5,098 ratings
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The Glorious Heresies

By: Lisa McInerney

Narrated by: Shelley Atkinson

Series: Ryan Cusack, Book 1

Length: 10 hrs and 56 mins

Release date: 26-05-16

Language: English

4.5 out of 5 stars 457 ratings
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How to Be Both

By: Ali Smith

Narrated by: Katie Leung

Length: 8 hrs and 36 mins

Release date: 11-02-21

Language: English

4.5 out of 5 stars 40 ratings
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A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing

By: Eimear McBride

Narrated by: Eimear McBride

Length: 7 hrs and 34 mins

Release date: 04-08-14

Language: English

4 out of 5 stars 315 ratings
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May We Be Forgiven

By: A. M. Homes

Narrated by: Nathan Osgood

Length: 19 hrs and 47 mins

Release date: 22-10-12

Language: English

4 out of 5 stars 249 ratings
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The Lacuna

By: Barbara Kingsolver

Narrated by: Barbara Kingsolver

Length: 19 hrs and 14 mins

Release date: 01-07-10

Language: English

4 out of 5 stars 313 ratings
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Home

By: Marilynne Robinson

Narrated by: Maggi-Meg Reed

Length: 12 hrs and 45 mins

Release date: 29-09-20

Language: English

4.5 out of 5 stars 42 ratings
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The Road Home

By: Rose Tremain

Narrated by: Steven Pacey

Length: 14 hrs and 47 mins

Release date: 19-08-08

Language: English

4.5 out of 5 stars 466 ratings
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Half of a Yellow Sun

By: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Narrated by: Zainab Jah

Length: 18 hrs and 9 mins

Release date: 28-09-17

Language: English

4.5 out of 5 stars 1,532 ratings
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We Need to Talk About Kevin

By: Lionel Shriver

Narrated by: Lorelei King

Length: 6 hrs and 23 mins

Release date: 15-08-06

Language: English

4.5 out of 5 stars 1,009 ratings
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Small Island

By: Andrea Levy

Narrated by: Andrea Levy

Length: 17 hrs and 24 mins

Release date: 07-05-15

Language: English

5 out of 5 stars 1,151 ratings
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Bel Canto

By: Ann Patchett

Narrated by: Anna Fields

Length: 11 hrs and 20 mins

Release date: 11-08-04

Language: English

4.5 out of 5 stars 249 ratings
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The Idea of Perfection

By: Kate Grenville

Narrated by: Odette Joannidis

Length: 10 hrs and 44 mins

Release date: 24-11-17

Language: English

4.5 out of 5 stars 29 ratings
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