V.V. Ganeshananthan was awarded the 2024 Women’s Prize for Fiction for her novel ‘Brotherless Night’ while Naomi Klein won the inaugural Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction for her book ‘Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World’ at a ceremony in London.
VV Ganeshananthan and Naomi Klein Win Women’s Prize 2024 for Fiction and Non-Fiction (Picture Credit – GettyImages)
The winners of the prestigious Women’s Prize For Fiction and the first Women’s Prize For Non-Fiction were announced at a ceremony in London last night.
The Women’s Prize For Fiction 2024 was awarded to American author V. V. Ganeshananthan, who is of Sri Lankan Tamil descent, for her second novel ‘Brotherless Night’. This tale of a young woman’s life disrupted by the Sri Lankan civil war was praised by Monica Ali, chair of judges, as a brilliant, compelling, and deeply moving novel that bears witness to the intimate and epic-scale tragedies of the conflict.
This year marked the launch of the inaugural Women’s Prize For Non-Fiction, which recognizes exceptional narrative non-fiction by women. The award went to Canadian writer, activist, and filmmaker Naomi Klein for her book ‘Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World’. Klein’s book uses her experience of being frequently mistaken for American author Naomi Wolf, known for her right-wing opinions, particularly related to the Covid-19 pandemic and the anti-vaccination movement. Klein’s work shines a light on social media, where conspiracy theories and disinformation reign, and examines our increasingly polarized society. According to Professor Suzannah Lipscomb, chair of judges for the Women’s Prize For Non-Fiction, ‘Doppelganger’ is a courageous, humane, and optimistic call-to-arms that moves us beyond black and white, beyond Right and Left, inviting us instead to embrace the spaces in between.
The Women’s Prizes celebrate female writing, and this year’s winners were each chosen from a shortlist of six books.
The fiction shortlist included former Women’s Prize for Fiction winner Kate Grenville, whose novel ‘The Ideas of Perfection’ won in 2001; Claire Kilroy’s fierce novel ‘Soldier Sailor’ on motherhood; the debut from French-Chinese-American novelist Aube Rey Lescure, ‘River East, River West’, a coming-of-age story set against China’s economic boom; and British-Palestinian author Isabella Hammad’s ‘Enter Ghost’, an examination of Palestinian identity.
The non-fiction shortlist was broad, tackling topics as varied as inheritance and dispossession (‘A Flat Place’ by Scottish-Pakistani writer Noreen Masud), the experience of slavery (‘All That She Carried’ by Tiya Miles), and the rapidly changing world of AI (‘Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI’ by the Financial Times’s AI Editor Madhumita Murgia).
The shortlist for the Women’s Prize For Fiction 2024 included:
- The Wren, The Wren by Anne Enright
- Brotherless Night by V. V. Ganeshananthan
- Restless Dolly Maunder by Kate Grenville
- Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad
- Soldier Sailor by Claire Kilroy
- River East, River West by Aube Rey Lescure
The shortlist for the Women’s Prize For Non-Fiction 2024 included:
- Thunderclap: A Memoir of Art and Life and Sudden Death by Laura Cumming
- Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein
- A Flat Place by Noreen Masud
- All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake by Tiya Miles
- Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI by Madhumita Murgia
- How to Say Babylon: A Jamaican Memoir by Safiya Sinclair
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