Good morning, and happy new year! While there are many exciting celebrations in 2026, for me, none is more special than the 30th anniversary of the Women’s prize for fiction.
Formerly the Orange, and then Baileys prize, this annual award for the best novel in English by a woman was founded in 1996 to rectify a glaring absence: the all-male 1991 Booker prize shortlist.
Times have thankfully changed. The Booker hasn’t seen an all-male shortlist in 20 years, while sensations like Sally Rooney and Elena Ferrante have paved the way for stories centering the complexities of women’s lives. Today, heavyweights like Margaret Atwood, Zadie Smith, Hilary Mantel, and Bernardine Evaristo share the spotlight with zeitgeist-capturing talents like Ottessa Moshfegh, Elif Batuman, Raven Leilani, and Megan Nolan. Together, they have ensured some of fiction’s most exciting developments are distinctly female-led.
Yet, this success has sparked a heated debate: is the male novelist being pushed out? When David Szalay won the Booker last year for his novel Flesh, this newspaper noted that novels of “female interiority” have dominated the past decade, making stories about young men hard to find.
But is that true? And what seismic changes have there been between now and when the Women’s prize was founded? Today, I speak to Catherine Taylor, a critic who has worked in the industry since 1992 and author of The Stirrings: A Memoir in Northern Time. That’s after the headlines.
In depth: ‘I had to ask permission to write my dissertation on Virginia Woolf’
Amid the 2021 Sally Rooney fervor, which followed the publication of her third novel, a question began to surface regarding the scarcity of young, male writers. A widely discussed article in Dazed asked where these writers had gone and what their absence meant for the publishing world. This was followed by a New York Times piece in 2024, exploring the “disappearance of literary men,” and, in 2025, this culminated in the announcement of a new literary press that would initially focus on male novelists, to find successors to the likes of Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie.
But in the early 1990s, when Catherine Taylor left university and moved to London to do a postgraduate degree, the situation was completely reversed. “All the books were written by Martin Amis,” she jokes. “It was very male-dominated. The atmosphere was about how there needs to be a redress on what was being commissioned, what was coming out and what was not being recognised.”
She recalls specific successful female writers, citing breakout hits like Donna Tartt’s The Secret History and Rachel Cusk’s Saving Agnes. However, she notes that several other now well-known names, including Hilary Mantel and Beryl Bainbridge, faced difficulties gaining recognition at the time.
It was a difficult time for women in literature. “When I studied English at university at the end of the 80s, the only female writers on my curriculum were two of the Brontë sisters, George Eliot, and Jane Austen. And I had to ask permission to write my dissertation on Virginia Woolf,” Taylor says.
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A slow-moving revolution
So how did we go from a dearth of female authors 30 years ago, to women consistently on the bestseller list and winning the biggest literary awards? It was a slow process, Taylor tells me.
“It wasn’t an overnight change,” she says, pointing to the work of the Women’s prize as being particularly effective at championing fiction writers, and nonfiction writers.
“I remember being at a Women’s prize event 15 years ago, and a male literary editor, I’m not going to name him, said ‘this shortlist is almost good enough for the Booker’,” she tells me. “It was very patronising. When Penelope Fitzgerald won the Booker prize with her novel Offshore in 1979, she was described as a ‘lady novelist’. It’s extraordinary to think about this happening throughout my adult life.”
There was also an important evolution of publishing and commissioning, Taylor adds. “The Women’s prize, in terms of winners, was very white when it started out. But as it’s gone on, publishing and appetites have changed. Younger women are coming into publishing and commissioning the books that they want to read, which are much more representative of the world and of readers as well.”
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Female domination?
While Taylor applauded the extraordinary efforts that have gone to rebalancing gender disparities in publishing, she pushed back on the idea that we have now reached a saturation point when it comes to women’s writing.
“Twice as many men as women have won the Booker prize. Exactly twice as many. And when Samantha Harvey won the Booker prize in 2024, she was the first woman to win it in five years,” she says. “The last woman to win the prize solely was Anna Burns with Milkman in 2018. Margaret Atwood and Bernardine Evaristo [the first black woman to win the Booker] had to share the prize in 2019.”
When we talk about who’s writing books, it is important to look at how many men and women actually read fiction. According to NielsenIQ BookData, women made up 63% of the fiction books bought in the UK in 2023. But they weren’t just picking up more novels, they were buying more books overall, constituting 58% of all book purchases in 2024. Men do come out ahead when looking at nonfiction, buying 55% compared to the 45% bought by women.
In fact, research commissioned by the Women’s prize in 2024 showed that while women read books by women and men equally, men “overwhelmingly reject” books written by women in favour of male authors. The organisation said the research demonstrated that their mission was just as relevant today as it was when they were founded.
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The struggle continues
When I asked Taylor what zeitgeisty novels written about women’s “interior lives” say about women today, she objected to the use of the word interior.
“Nobody calls men’s writing interior or inward when they’re writing about male subjects,” Taylor says.
“Why is it seen that women are writing domestic books?” she says. “Somebody described Samantha Harvey’s book Orbital as quiet. This is an extraordinary book about how human beings are interconnected and how they’re isolated, by using the situation that they’re in – they’re in space. You can’t really get more external.”
Taylor’s own memoir, The Stirrings, was set in the 1980s when she was a teenager, and at the time she thought she was being quite explicit. But she has been so excited by how bold women’s writing is today. “I really love that women are writing about their desires and their needs and the way that they’re interpreting the world through the body and the mind,” Taylor says.
She adds: “Men have used women in novels as objects or as subjects, but in a very one-dimensional way for as long as I have been reading contemporary fiction. Men have also used women’s novels as springboards for their own. I love Martin Amis’s writing. He’s an absolutely brilliant writer sentence by sentence, but I don’t think he would have written London Fields if he hadn’t read The Driver’s Seat by Muriel Spark. And I don’t think he would have written Time’s Arrow if he hadn’t read his stepmother Elizabeth Jane Howard’s book The Long View.”
Taylor says that after Howard’s death, some headlines reduced her to merely being “Martin Amis’ stepmother.” Her obituary in the Guardian echoed this sentiment, observing that she “suffered a certain condescension from literary editors as a writer of ‘women’s novels’.” It’s worth noting that Amis himself went on to credit both Howard and Jane Austen as hugely influential literary figures.
“Why is it seen as interior when we’re talking about things that matter to us?” continues Taylor. “In a world where women and human rights are being rolled back daily, why can we not talk about all these things that have oppressed and continued to oppress and also interest us?”
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