The Booker Prize is an annual literary prize awarded for a single work of English fiction published in the United Kingdom or in Ireland. Whether by accident or design, as one of the most profound and prestigious literary awards, shortlists for the prize make a statement. First awarded in 1969, the Booker Prize has historically written off female authors, with 36 men outnumbering the 19 female prize winners. This backwards statistic makes us wonder, should we instead call it, ‘The Male Longlist’?
We should however provide awards to reflect the full breadth of the literary landscape, and by excluding the notion of gender we prohibit this
Questioning the gendered divide in shortlists forces a choice between selecting the ‘best’ books regardless of gender, or prioritising gender parity. We should however provide awards to reflect the full breadth of the literary landscape, and by excluding the notion of gender we prohibit this. With no women featured in the 1991 shortlist, in a year when 60% of novelists were women, gender disparity has existed in favouring male authors. In response to the 1991 all-male shortlist, Kate Mosse established the Women’s Prize for Fiction to remove the gender disparity and celebrate female writing.
We are however looking towards a bright horizon. Recent trends suggest higher gender parity in the literary field. Hilary Mantel has famously won the award twice for Wolf Hall (2009) and Bring Up the Bodies (2012). Margret Atwood (one of my personal favourites) has also won twice with a controversial slit victory in 2019 for The Testaments, the sequel of the beloved Handmaid’s Tale. Bernardine Evaristo jointly won the 2019 prize for Girl, Woman, Other, making her the first Black woman to win the award. More recently, last year’s shortlist had a record number of women with a ratio of 5:1, Samantha Harvey’s novel Orbital coming out on top.
We have waited and fought for the representation, celebration and domination of our female voices on the literary stage. Is the stage finally ours to dominate?
Earlier this November David Szalay won the Booker Prize for his novel Flesh, and although it is another man to add to the long list of male winners, the shortlist this year had an equal gender split. Female voices of Susan Choi (Flashlight), Kiran Desai (The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny) and Katie Kitamura (Audition) were heard and represented. The five-person judging panel, chaired by Roddy Doyle, also includes three women: Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Kiley Reid. We have waited and fought for the representation, celebration and domination of our female voices on the literary stage. Is the stage finally ours to dominate?
Dawn is breaking in this new literary female era. We are bored of hearing repetitive male voices. And like Kate Mosse has highlighted and shown, if our voices are not celebrated through standard forms, we will create new ways to be heard.
Women are writing the future, and the Booker Prize needs to reflect this. Let’s see what the 2026 Booker prize has to offer.