Archive Collection
Women's Prize for Fiction Winners
1996–2026
The Women's Prize for Fiction is one of the UK's most prestigious literary awards, presented annually since 1996 to the best full length novel written in English by a woman of any nationality. Formerly the Orange Prize and the Baileys Prize, it has celebrated writers from Zadie Smith and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie to Maggie O'Farrell and Barbara Kingsolver.
About the Women's Prize for Fiction
- Awarded by
- Women's Prize Trust
- First awarded
- 1996
- Country
- United Kingdom
- Winner receives
- £30,000
When it is announced
The winner is announced in June, after a longlist in March and a shortlist in April. See the full announcement calendar.
How to enter
Publishers submit. Eligible books are full length novels written in English by a woman of any nationality and published in the UK during the prize year.
Official prize site · Checked August 2026. Dates move year to year, so confirm on the official site before entering.
| Year | Title & Author | Historical Context |
|---|---|---|
| 2026 | The Correspondent | The Correspondent won the 2026 Women's Prize for Fiction on 11 June 2026 in London, taking the £30,000 award and the Bessie statuette. Julia Gillard,… |
| 2025 | The Safekeep | The Safekeep won the Women's Prize in 2025 and had been shortlisted for the 2024 Booker, an extraordinary arc for a debut, and Kirkus called it a… |
| 2024 | Brotherless Night | Brotherless Night won the Women's Prize in 2024 and the Carol Shields Prize the same season, an almost unheard of double for one book, and arrived… |
| 2023 | Demon Copperhead | Demon Copperhead shared the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction with Hernan Diaz's Trust, the first split in the category's history. It took the Women's… |
| 2022 | The Book of Form and Emptiness | The Book of Form and Emptiness won the Women's Prize in 2022, a divided choice the reviews had predicted: the Guardian enjoyed its dry, methodical… |
| 2021 | Piranesi | Piranesi won the Women's Prize in 2021, a fantasy novel taking a prize that rarely rewards one, and the win sat on top of a comeback story: sixteen… |
| 2020 | Hamnet | Hamnet won the Women's Prize in 2020, a pandemic year in which a novel pivoting on plague transmission read very differently than its author… |
| 2019 | An American Marriage | An American Marriage won the Women's Prize in 2019. Oprah Winfrey had chosen it for her book club within weeks of publication, Barack Obama put it on… |
| 2018 | Home Fire | Home Fire won the Women's Prize in 2018 and was longlisted for the Booker; the BBC later placed it among the hundred most influential novels. Kamila… |
| 2017 | The Power | The Power won the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction in 2017, taking the thirty thousand pound award and the bronze figurine known as the Bessie at a… |
| 2016 | The Glorious Heresies | The Glorious Heresies won the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction in 2016, and it was a debut, which the prize has always been willing to reward but… |
| 2015 | How to Be Both | How to Be Both won the Baileys Women's Prize in 2015, completing a sweep that already included the Goldsmiths Prize and the Costa Novel Award, with a… |
| 2014 | A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing | A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing won the Baileys Women's Prize in 2014 and had already taken the inaugural Goldsmiths Prize, founded to reward fiction… |
| 2013 | May We Be Forgiven | May We Be Forgiven won the Women's Prize in 2013, the first year it carried that name after the Orange sponsorship ended, and it was a… |
| 2012 | The Song of Achilles | The Song of Achilles won the Orange Prize in 2012, with Joanna Trollope, chairing the judges, declaring Homer would be proud; not every classicist… |
| 2011 | The Tiger's Wife | The Tiger's Wife won the Orange Prize in 2011, and Téa Obreht, at twenty five, became the youngest winner in the prize's history; the book was also a… |
| 2010 | The Lacuna | The Lacuna won the Orange Prize in 2010. Reviews on publication were respectful rather than rapturous, some finding the first Mexican half so vivid… |
| 2009 | Home | Home won the Orange Prize in 2009 and had already taken the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and a National Book Award finalist spot. It is the second… |
| 2008 | The Road Home | The Road Home won the Orange Prize in 2008, and part of its force was timing: Poland and its neighbours had joined the EU four years earlier, the… |
| 2007 | Half of a Yellow Sun | Half of a Yellow Sun won the Orange Prize in 2007, when Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was twenty nine, and in 2020 the public vote for the prize's twenty… |
| 2006 | On Beauty | On Beauty won the Orange Prize in 2006, having already been shortlisted for the 2005 Booker, and it settled the question Zadie Smith's debut had… |
| 2005 | We Need to Talk About Kevin | We Need to Talk About Kevin won the Orange Prize in 2005, and its road there is publishing legend: Lionel Shriver's agent could not sell it, the… |
| 2004 | Small Island | Small Island swept 2004, winning the Orange Prize, the Whitbread Book of the Year and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, and it has kept accumulating… |
| 2003 | Property | Property won the Orange Prize in 2003 as the shortlist's outsider: the bookmakers had Donna Tartt's The Little Friend as favourite, with Zadie… |
| 2002 | Bel Canto | Bel Canto won both the Orange Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award in 2002, a transatlantic double very few novels have managed, and became a book club… |
| 2001 | The Idea of Perfection | The Idea of Perfection won the Orange Prize in 2001, an Australian win in a prize the British press still treated as a domestic event, and the… |
| 2000 | When I Lived in Modern Times | When I Lived in Modern Times won the Orange Prize in 2000, and it made the case for the prize's range: a novel of ideas wearing the clothes of a… |
| 1999 | A Crime in the Neighborhood | A Crime in the Neighborhood won the Orange Prize in 1999, a first novel beating a heavyweight shortlist, and its reviews fastened on exactly the… |
| 1998 | Larry's Party | Larry's Party won the Orange Prize in 1998, and there was a pleasing mischief in the choice: a prize founded to honour women's fiction going to the… |
| 1997 | Fugitive Pieces | Fugitive Pieces won the Orange Prize in 1997, its second year, and the Guardian Fiction Prize as well, a rare double for a first novel. Anne Michaels… |
| 1996 | A Spell of Winter | A Spell of Winter won the very first Orange Prize for Fiction in 1996, which gives it a permanent place in the story of the prize itself: founded… |