Women's Prize 2024

At the Golden Sunset retirement home, it is not unusual for residents to invent stories. So when elderly Ms Mook first begins to unspool her memories, the obituarist listening to her is sceptical. Stories of captivity, friendship, murder, adventure, assumed identities and spying. Stories that tak...

Noreen Masud has always loved flatlands. Her earliest memory is of a wide, flat field glimpsed from the back seat of her father's car in Lahore. As an adult in Britain she's discovered many more flat landscapes to love: Orford Ness, Morecambe Bay, the Cambridgeshire Fens, Orkney. These bare, haun...

Claire Kilroy takes us deep into the early days of motherhood. Exploring the clash of fierce love for a new life with a seismic change in identity, she vividly realises the raw, tumultuous emotions of a new mother, as her marriage strains and she struggles with questions of love, autonomy and cre...

In 1850s South Carolina, Rose, an enslaved woman, faced a crisis: the imminent sale of her daughter Ashley. Thinking quickly, she packed a cotton bag with a few items. Soon after, the nine-year-old girl was separated from her mother and sold. Decades later, Ashley's granddaughter Ruth embroidered...

After years away from her family's homeland, and healing from an affair with an established director, stage actress Sonia Nasir returns to Palestine to visit her older sister Haneen. Though the siblings grew up spending summers at their family home in Haifa, Sonia hasn't been back since the secon...

This is the story of Britain's islands and how they are woven into its culture, history and collective psyche. From Neolithic Orkney and druidical Anglesey to the joys and strangeness of modern Thanet, we explore the furthest reaches of Britain's island topography, once known by the collective te...

During pregnancy, childbirth and early motherhood, women undergo a far-reaching physiological and psychological metamorphosis. There is no other time in a human's life course that entails such dramatic change other than adolescence. And yet this life-altering transition has been sorely neglected ...

‘WOW. Western Lane is glorious. You’ll want to read it over and over again.' - Aravind Adiga, author of The White TigerEleven-year-old Gopi has been playing squash since she was old enough to hold a racket. When her mother dies, her father enlists her in a quietly brutal training regimen, and the...

What makes a good death? A good daughter? In 2009, with her forties and a harsh wave of austerity on the horizon, Marianne Brooker's mother was diagnosed with primary progressive multiple sclerosis. She made a workshop of herself and her surroundings, combining creativity and activism in inventiv...

Nell - funny, brave and so much loved - is a young woman with adventure on her mind. As she sets out into the world, she finds her family history hard to escape. For her mother, Carmel, Nell's leaving home opens a space in her heart, where the turmoil of a lifetime begins to churn. And across the...