Mosse reflects on 25 years of the Women’s Prize as 2020 event prepares to go online

The 25th winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction (WPF) will be crowned next week, and like most literary gongs of 2020, its latest iteration will be Covid-19-affected, with a change of date and a now online ceremony. But what has not shifted is WPF’s rock-solid place in the books world, neck and neck with the Costa as the second or third-most prestigious British award, and arguably having the most bookseller buy-in and consumer brand awareness of any prize outside the Booker. 

The silver anniversary, though, is a good time to reflect that it was an often rocky road to arrive here. To get a measure of the opprobrium directed at the industry professionals and writers who launched WPF, co-founder Kate Mosse takes us back to the press conference to officially announce the prize’s first sponsor, Orange, in January 1996. Mosse says: “This was a long time coming and it had been a lot of hard work by a lot of people to get the prize off the ground. So I made a rather impassioned speech about how this was a great thing for writers and the industry—it was a new, well-funded prize celebrating books; who could object to that?—and the first question was from an editor of one of the tabloids who asked me: ‘Are you a lesbian?’ Maybe I was young and naïve, because even though there was some controversy around the launch and the press was at times pretty hostile, that question had me rolling my eyes.” 

That red-top editor’s question, packaged with all its sneering misogyny and homophobia, was the most knuckle-dragging of that press conference, but it was perhaps not entirely out of step with a lot of media coverage in the prize’s early days. The kernel of the WPF came after the 1991 Booker Prize, in which no women were on the shortlist. In January 1992 a committee of publishing insiders grouped together to form a counterbalancing, women-only prize. Members of that committee included literary agent Jane Gregory, Cornerstone m.d. Susan Sandon, former Michael Joseph marketing director (and WPF’s current m.d.) Harriet Hastings, and Mosse, who at the time had just left her role at Random House to focus on writing. Because she “didn’t have a proper full-time job”, Mosse became the director. 

The knives came out almost immediately, with the notion of a literary gong for women proving controversial and hitting a nerve, particularly among a certain class of literary London: Auberon Waugh and Kingsley Amis robustly decried it; while an opinion piece by Simon Jenkins in the Times, calling the prize a “blot on Britain’s literary landscape” and “sexist”, did much to scare off a first sponsor, Mitsubishi Pens. And it was not just the tweedy pale, male and stale set who spoke out. Booker winners A S Byatt and Anita Brookner were among the prominent female novelists who said they would not put their books forward as, in Byatt’s words, the prize would “ghettoise women”. 

Nevertheless, WPF persisted and it took only a few years to bed in with booksellers and the general public. Mosse says: “We wanted women’s creative voices to be heard, we wanted women’s critical voices to be heard. That’s why we set it up. But the reason the prize has lasted this long is that the novels that have been longlisted and shortlisted, and those that have won, can appeal to and engage with a very wide audience.” 

Future proofing 
The past few years have been transformative for the prize, as its business and funding model has changed. When the second headline sponsor, Baileys (which succeeded Orange in 2013) reduced its level of funding in 2017, WPF went to a collective sponsorship scheme the following year, before setting itself up as a charity last year. 

Penguin General m.d. Joanna Prior, who is chair of the WPF board, says: “At even the best of times, getting and keeping funding can be challenging; diversifying sponsors and finding different ways to get funding is about ensuring that we are sustainable for years to come. But our charitable status reflects the different kind of approach we have had for quite a few years, in that we’re not just about the main prize itself but also year-round on education, outreach and developing new writers.”

WPF’s first filing to the Charity Commission shows this spread of funding, with 58% (or £305,000) of WPF’s £525,000 in earnings for the year derived from sponsorship money (a spread between Baileys, NatWest and the production company Fremantle). Around 36% (£140,000) comes from its patrons and donations scheme, £51,000 from fees from longlisted and shortlisted publishers, while the £30,000 winner’s fee is derived from an anonymous donation. 

Whether it is because of the prize’s educational push or the 25th anniversary (or a bit of both), there has certainly been a lot of extra initiatives this year, including #ReadingWomen, the online book club featuring the 24 previous winners, leading up to a public vote for the “Winner of Winners”, revealed on 9th September. Discoveries, a first-time writer development programme/competition with Curtis Brown will see the winner receive £5,000 and earn representation by the agency. Reclaim Her Name, a series of free e-books produced in collaboration with Baileys, saw classics that were originally published under a male pseudonym released with their female writers’ real names—such as Middlemarch by Mary Anne Evans. And a crowdfunded 25th-anniversary anthology will be published by Unbound. 

The pandemic, of course, has shifted how all these programmes and the main prize have been delivered. Early on in the Covid crisis, the award ceremony, usually held in June, was pushed to September in the hope of having a physical event. That has not panned out, but the prize is doing a series of online readings by the shortlistees on three consecutive nights leading up to the announcement on 9th September. 

Mosse says: “I think we have learned a lot, having our main virtual events later in the year, as we have seen the clever things other prizes and festivals have done, plus online audiences have evolved a lot from March to September. We usually do our readings with all the shortlistees on one night, but there is a bit of Zoom fatigue, so we are limiting them to two authors, for an hour, on three nights.”

WPF is charging for those events: £10 for the three reading nights and the main ceremony itself. Sales have been “brisk”, Mosse says, and adds: “We did a lot of Instagram Live and other digital events for free over the past few months, and that’s great for engagement and expanding the audience across the world. Yes, we’re charging for these events, but they are deliberately priced very low and there is an option for discounted book sales via Waterstones.”

That expanded audience engagement has been a 2020 upside for the prize, Mosse believes, and adds: “Because of the revised timescale, it’s safe to say that this year’s shortlist has had much more time and attention than previous ones, and we’ve had a lot longer with #ReadingWomen than we would have thought. We may still have some kind of physical 25th anniversary celebration this year, though it will probably be in 2021. But whatever, it has still been a good year for reading women and, with projects like Discoveries, thinking about who the women writers of the future will be.”

The table above right shows the top 20 Women's Prize titles ranked by volume.