Gillian Anderson and Naomie Harris to perform at Women's Prize virtual festival

Actors including Gillian Anderson, Naomie Harris and Jason Isaacs are to perform readings from the Women’s Prize for Fiction shortlist, as part of the prize’s annual three-day virtual festival. 

A trio of events running from Monday 23rd May to Wednesday 25th May will take place live online, chaired by author and prize co-founder Kate Mosse and beginning at 7pm. Festival attendees will have the to opportunity to put forward their questions to the authors.

Anderson, who has recently filmed series three of Netflix’s "Sex Education", will be performing an excerpt from Meg Mason’s Sorrow and Bliss (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), while Harris, whose film roles have included Eve Moneypenny in the James Bond films, will perform an extract from The Bread the Devil Knead by Lisa Allen-Agostini (Myriad Editions). Harry Potter star Issacs will read from Ruth Ozeki’s The Book of Form and Emptiness (Canongate).

Readings from Elif Shafak’s The Island of Missing Trees and Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead (both Penguin) and Louise Erdrich’s The Sentence (Little, Brown) will also be performed, with actors yet to be confirmed. 
Tickets cost £25 for all three events, or £10 per ticket per evening. 

The winner of the prize will be announced on 15th June 2022 at an evening awards ceremony in central London. She will receive an anonymously endowed cheque for £30,000 and a limited-edition bronze figurine known as a "Bessie", created and donated by the artist Grizel Niven.