Thirty years on from when Founder Director Kate Mosse announced a brand new annual literary prize, the Women's Prize for Fiction has been integral to the change in the landscape for women writers and readers all over the world. Encouraging and engaging with as wide and diverse a range of both writers and readers the conversation and perception about what and how women write has shifted. And with the launch of the Women's Prize for Non-Fiction it's clear that the trust has no signs of slowing down. 

LoveReading has been wholehearted supporters of the Women's Prize for years now, and we've been alongside readers discovering new and exciting writing by women every year when the longlists are announced. We are over the moon to have had the chance to catch up with Executive Director of the Women's Prize Trust, Claire Shanahan to reflect on and celebrate the work of the Prizes and the Discoveries programme, helping women from across the UK to carve space out for themselves in the book world. We also look at the work still to do, plans to mark the 30th year and how we readers can support the work of getting women's writing into the hands of more readers in December. 

Over to you, Claire...

The Women’s Prize is the home of women's voices with a mission of bringing people together through a shared passion for books written by women. Is being Executive Director of that the absolute best job ever Claire? We’d love to hear about your journey.

Absolutely, I often say to friends that I have the best job in books! I feel hugely privileged to be part of such an incredible organisation that celebrates women’s voices from around the world. 

Since its inception 30 years ago, the Women’s Prize for Fiction has created bestsellers, launched debut careers, and cultivated a legion of loyal readers, listeners and influencers. It’s also generated millions of pounds for the book trade, whilst helping to form a supportive community of creatives and readers. 

In 2018, the Women’s Prize became a registered charity, the Women’s Prize Trust, and our remit widened. We had always run initiatives for writers at the start of their career: beginning with the Orange Award for New Writers and then, a  bit later, our First Chapter competition, but it wasn’t until 2020, that we set up a more comprehensive programme to support writers who were unagented and unpublished. Discoveries was a hugely exciting project for the Trust, and for me personally, as it enabled us to encourage, support and nurture new talent in a truly meaningful way. It’s been a really wonderful and rewarding part of my career. 

And as for how I got here, I’m very much a child of books. I was raised by a tenacious single mum who fed my reading habit in Willesden Library in north-west London and empowered me as the first in my family to go to university. I began my career as an editor at educational publisher Pearson before moving to Hachette, and learned a lot about publishing as a business. I spent seven years at Booktrust, running a portfolio of promotional projects, from the Children’s Laureate and the Richard and Judy Children’s Book Club to the Sunday Times Short Story Award and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. It was during that time that I worked with the Women’s Prize, and after a stint of consulting for clients like the Guardian and the BBC, I returned to the Women’s Prize in 2019 to support its transformation to a charity.

Has there been a highlight of your time at the Women’s Prize Trust?

The highlight of my year is always June, when we draw together our community in London for several days of celebration. We host the Women’s Prize LIVE festival, inviting readers and writers to come together to discuss books, the issues they inspire and the emotions they evoke in us. Books build empathy and empower connection, so seeing this in action is a very special thing.

And then we announce the winners of the Fiction and the new Non-Fiction Prize after months of showcasing 32 women’s work each year. It’s an enormous joy to watch the excitement on the authors’ faces on stage. And a huge delight always to see the impact that winning the prize has on an author’s  book and career in the weeks, months and years that follow. 

My proudest achievement, however, has been the development of the Discoveries programme in association with Audible, Curtis Brown literary agency and Curtis Brown Creative writing school. With over 10,000 new writers having submitted their writing to date to our programme, it’s been a thrilling experience seeing so many women from across the UK, from so many different backgrounds, carving out space for themselves, engaging with the creative process of writing and sustaining a career as an author.   

In May of this year new research commissioned by the Women’s Prize Trust confirmed that while women read books by women and men equally, men overwhelmingly reject books written by women in favour of male authors. Please tell us about that research and what you are doing to address gender bias.

The Women’s Prize Trust commissioned Nielsen BookData to research male book purchasing and reading habits in an attempt to understand the inequality that still exists for many female authors, across both fiction and non-fiction. Our data revealed that men rarely buy books written by women. Only 19% of readers of the top 20 bestselling fiction authors published in 2023, including Jane Austen, Agatha Christie, Harper Lee, and the non-fiction author, Rhonda Byrne, were male. In stark comparison, readers of top 20 bestselling male authors including George Orwell, Charles Dickens, Stephen King and James Patterson, as well as Prince Harry, Robert Kiyosaki and James Clear were almost equally male and female (56% men versus 44% women). Simply put, women are generally happy to read a book written by a man, whilst men rarely buy books written by women! We want to change that unconscious yet systemic bias and put the widest range of exceptional, original books into the hands of all readers. 

Further research recently revealed a growing pay gap between male and female non-fiction authors, and a comparative lack of visibility for female non-fiction writers in the media. This campaign was one of the motivating factors for the launch of the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction in 2024. Huge congratulations, is it all you wanted it to be?

The Women’s Prize Trust had long been considering a sister Prize for Non-Fiction but it was really the research we commissioned in 2022 which was the motivating factor for launching the new Prize when we did. Anecdotally, we knew that non-fiction female authors were not being taken as seriously as their male counterparts (or paid as much money), but our own research showed that female non-fiction writers are less likely to be reviewed in the UK national media and less likely to be shortlisted, or win, book prizes than their male counterparts. Further research commissioned by the Women’s Prize Trust from Nielsen BookData revealed the impact of this trend on the UK bestseller list: only 34% of the top 500 bestselling nonfiction books in 2022 were written by women. 

Whilst the launch of our Non-Fiction Prize last year was well received by media and readers alike, there is a lot more work to be done to create genuine equity. Our most recent data, commissioned in Sept 2024, shows that there is a huge discrepancy across the board for non-fiction. For instance, in the Top 50 bestselling science titles in the UK only 11% were authored by women, for political books its 17%,  history its 30%, psychology and self help its 32%. So what, you might say? Books don’t exist in isolation, they reflect and amplify what is going on within our real world. Less non-fiction books by women in our bookshops and libraries, means less women being seen as authorities and experts. The Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction aims to change this perception, by creating a platform for female voices, whilst celebrating books that inform, challenge, disrupt, and offer solace and connection.

And next year is the 30th year anniversary of the Women’s Fiction Prize. Can you give us an inside peek at what your plans are to celebrate such a momentous event? 

The 30th year is a great moment to look back at what we’ve achieved to date. And we’ve achieved a lot! The 29 books that have won the Women’s Prize for Fiction (up to and including 2024’s winner, VV Ganeshananthan’s Brotherless Night) have sold over 7 million copies to date, to a value of £51 million. And this is in the UK alone. Many more writers - including those longlisted and shortlisted - have gained overseas publishers as a result of being nominated for the Prize, not to mention the legions of loyal readers. 

In our 30th year, we will obviously be celebrating the wonderful women who have been nominated for the prize, and won, but we’ll also be looking to the future. Under our Writers’ Room brand, we plan to increase the number of free writing workshops we offer, develop a new series of online and regional networking events to introduce writers to experts in the industry, and substantially bolster our toolkit of online resources for aspiring writers. If we manage to raise enough money through our December fundraiser (more info below), we hope to also launch for the first time bespoke mentorships to nurture early-careers specifically for writers from underrepresented backgrounds. Our aim is to facilitate writing as a viable and fulfilling career.  We hope you’ll support us! 

As a registered charity, the Women’s Prize Trust operates on a mixed funding model. I imagine donors are absolutely critical to this. What support do you need to enable the Trust to continue shining a light on women and putting women’s writing into the hands of more readers?

Being an arts charity in the current economic climate is certainly very challenging. Luckily we do have a band of supportive donors, men, and women, who help us to do the things we do, but there is so much more work to be done to create genuine equity in the world of books. That’s why next week we are launching a ‘Big Give’ Christmas fundraising appeal, seeking financial support from readers to expand our 2025 Writers’ Room programme. It’s significantly more challenging to launch and sustain a writing career if you’re a woman from a lower socio-economic and global majority background as well as for those living with disabilities and chronic illnesses. The Women’s Prize Trust is aiming to raise £20,000 between 3rd–10th December, which will be doubled by the Big Give Christmas Challenge. These funds will make it possible for us to continue working to develop a practical, inclusive, free-to-access writers’ programme that targets these underrepresented groups, enabling us to reach 5,000 aspiring writers in the first year and 15,000 over three years. We’d love you to be part of this mission!

How to support the Women’s Prize Trust:

● Personal donations made via the Big Give website – from 12pm Tuesday 3 Dec to 12pm Tuesday 10 December – will be doubled. 

● Personal donations can be made outside of this window via the Women’s Prize Trust’s website.