V. V. Ganeshananthan and Naomi Klein are the winners of this year’s Women’s Prizes, given annually to outstanding books by women authors.
Ganeshananthan won the Women’s Prize for Fiction for Brotherless Night, her novel about a woman who works as a field medic for the Tamil Tigers, the militant Sri Lankan group that was founded in 1976 and active for more than three decades after. The novel previously won the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction.
Monica Ali, the chair of judges for the fiction award, said in a statement, “In rich, evocative prose, Ganeshananthan creates a vivid sense of time and place and an indelible cast of characters. Her commitment to complexity and clear-eyed moral scrutiny combines with spellbinding storytelling to render Brotherless Night a masterpiece of historical fiction.”
Klein was named the first-ever winner of the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction for Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World, which was inspired by her realization that people online were conflating her with Naomi Wolf, the author and conspiracy theorist. A critic for Kirkus called the book, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, “a disarming and addictive call to solidarity.”
The jury chair for the prize, Suzannah Lipscomb, said, “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 Prize for Fiction was established in 1996. Previous winners include Ann Patchett for Bel Canto, Zadie Smith for On Beauty, and Maggie O’Farrell for Hamnet.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
