American writer V.V. Ganeshananthan won this year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction on June 13 for her novel Brotherless Night, about a family torn apart by Sri Lanka’s long civil war. Its sister award, the inaugural Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction, went to author-activist Naomi Klein for Doppelganger, a personal account of her plunge into the world of online misinformation. The two awards come with £30,000 ($38,000) each in prize money.
Both winners referenced the conflict-clouded international situation, at a time when the arts world is grappling with divisions over the Israel-Hamas war and corporate sponsorship of the arts.
Brotherless Night: ‘Brilliant, compelling and deeply moving’
Ganeshananthan’s victorious second novel, which traces an aspiring medic’s journey through the war’s brutality and moral uncertainties, took almost two decades to complete. The Sri Lankan Tamil-origin Ganeshananthan’s first novel Love Marriage was published in 2008, and she started Brotherless Night in 2004. She said writing historical fiction “carefully and thoughtfully” about a traumatic conflict well within living memory that was true to people’s experience was “hard work”.
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“It took such a long time because of the chorus of people it was necessary to talk to,” she said. She said that faced with conflicts like the Israel-Hamas war, “what can writing do? Hopefully push people to collective actual action.”
Novelist Monica Ali, who chaired the fiction judging panel, said Brotherless Night is “a brilliant, compelling, and deeply moving novel that bears witness to the intimate and epic-scale tragedies of the Sri Lankan civil war”. Besides Monica Ali, author Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ; author-illustrator Laura Dockrill; actor Indira Varma; and presenter and author Anna Whitehouse were also on the judging panel.
Doppelganger: Part memoir, part reportage
Klein, the author of No Logo and The Shock Doctrine, delves into her experience of being mistaken for Naomi Wolf, author of The Beauty Myth and more recently a promulgator of anti-vax ideas and other conspiracy theories. Part memoir and part reportage, Doppelganger—subtitled “A Trip into the Mirror World”—investigates how online life has distorted reality, and asks what might be done about it.
Naomi Klein after being announced as the winner of the 2024 Women’s Prize for Nonfiction in London on June 13, 2024. Her book Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World is a personal account of her plunge into the world of online misinformation. | Photo Credit: MATT CROSSICK/AP
Historian Suzannah Lipscomb, who headed a panel of judges for the nonfiction award, called Klein’s book “a courageous, humane and optimistic call-to-arms that moves us beyond black and white, beyond Right and Left”. Other judges were fair fashion campaigner Venetia La Manna; academic, author, and consultant Nicola Rollock; biographer and journalist Anne Sebba; and author and 2018 Women’s Prize winner Kamila Shamsie.
Klein thanked the prize for “not shying away from controversy”. She has backed calls for book festivals to stop taking money from companies with investments in fossil fuels or Israel’s defence sector, a campaign that has led to UK events cancelling funding from finance firm Baillie Gifford. Some argue that starves the arts of much-needed funds, but Klein said she “wanted to use the platform to call for more courage from cultural institutions”.
Fixing gender imbalance
The non-fiction award was launched this year to help fix the gender imbalance in the publishing world, where men buy more nonfiction than women—and write more prize-winning non-fiction books. Prize organisers say that in 2022, only 26.5 per cent of nonfiction books reviewed in Britain’s newspapers were by women, and male writers dominated established non-fiction writing prizes.
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Both fiction and non-fiction prizes are open to female English-language writers from any country. The fiction prize was founded in 1996, and past winners include Zadie Smith, Tayari Jones, and Barbara Kingsolver, who won in 2023 for Demon Copperhead.
(with inputs from AP)
