The Queen has hailed a leading fiction competition for bringing female voices from the “margins” to the “very centre” of the literary world.
Camilla made a surprise appearance at an open-air event celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Women’s Prize for Fiction and met the shortlisted authors for this year’s award.
Writer Kate Mosse, co-founder of the prize, described Camilla as a “genuine reader” who has supported the project, and said about the royal appearance: “If you’re going to lay on the Queen, if it’s not Beyonce, it’s got to be the actual Queen.”
The Queen stopped broadcaster Louise Minchin, who was hosting a discussion, to address the audience in Bedford Square gardens in central London, and told guests that 1995, when the prize was launched, was a significant year for women.
While women were winning a Nobel Prize and piloting a space shuttle for the first time in 1995, she said things were “bleaker” in the literary world with only 9% of female authors shortlisted for major prizes despite writing 60% of novels.
Camilla said Mosse led the founding of the Women’s Prize for Fiction as “they believed that women’s stories should be truly heard, understood and honoured; and that it was time to disprove Virginia Woolf’s famous statement that ‘Anon…was often a woman'”.
She added: “They did this by establishing the Women’s Prize for Fiction and its instantly recognisable statuette, ‘The Bessie’. This simple, but radical, step brought the female voice from the margins of the literary world to its very centre.”
Camilla chatted to the six shortlisted authors – Aria Aber, Sanam Mahloudji, Elizabeth Strout, Nussaibah Younis, Miranda July and Yael van der Wouden.
Younis joked with the Queen and made the group laugh when she said: “We’re trying to take each other out, the champagne glasses are spiked, there could be one left standing.”
After speaking to Camilla, she said about her fellow shortlisted writers: “I have read all of the books and I’m blown away. They’re funny and so sexy and very erotic.”
The Queen was then introduced to the six shortlisted authors for the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction, including singer-songwriter and rapper Neneh Cherry, whose debut book, A Thousand Threads tells the story of her career.
“I wrote a memoir, a book about my life,” she told Camilla.
“It took more than four years to write it and I’m still slightly recovering. It’s out there now, I have let it go, it’s out in the world.”
The Queen told Claire Mulley, whose Agent Zo tells the story of the Polish wartime resistance fighter Elzbieta Zawacka: “I think I will put that on my holiday reading list.”
And she delighted author Chloe Dalton by telling her she had read her memoir Raising Hare about swapping the rat race for a rural life.
“Thank you so much, I am honoured,” she replied.
