The Women’s Prize for Fiction is the greatest celebration of female creativity in the world.
The 2025 shortlist includes 6 novels that explore the need for personal freedom and human connection. They offer compelling multi-layered stories that urge you to sit up and take notice of the world around you.
Good Girl by Aria Aber
All Fours by Miranda July
The Persians by Sanam Mahloudji
Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout
The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden
Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis
The judging panel for the 2025 Prize is chaired by author Kit de Waal. She is joined by novelist, journalist and inaugural winner of the Orange Award for New Writers (the Women’s Prize for debut novelists in 2006), Diana Evans; author, journalist and mental-health campaigner, Bryony Gordon; magazine editor, most recently Editor-in-Chief of Glamour UK, Deborah Joseph; and musician and composer known for award-winning film scores, Amelia Warner.
The full list in alphabetical order by author surname is:
Winner
Brotherless Night by V. V. Ganeshananthan is the 29th winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction. This beautifully written story follows Sashi, a sixteen-year-old aspiring doctor, growing up in Jaffna in the 1980s. Her close family is torn apart by the onset of civil war. Brotherless Night vividly and compassionately centres itself around erased and marginalised stories – Tamil women, students, teachers, ordinary civilians – exploring the moral nuances of violence and terrorism against a backdrop of oppression and exile.
Brotherless Night
The Women’s Prize for Fiction is one of the most successful, influential and popular literary prizes in the world, championing and amplifying women’s voices and nurturing a global community of readers.
The Prize was established in 1996 to highlight and remedy the imbalance in coverage, respect and reverence given to women writers versus their male peers, creating a platform for exceptional writing by women to shine.
The Prize is awarded annually to the author of the best full-length novel of the year written in English and published in the UK. The winner receives £30,000, anonymously endowed, and the ‘Bessie’, a bronze statuette created by the artist Grizel Niven.
Every year, a panel of five women, all passionate readers and at the top of their respective professions, choose the winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction.
The whole process starts in the summer of the previous year, when we invite UK publishers to submit eligible books.
Judges plunge immediately into reading their allocated books, basing their deliberations for the longlist, shortlist and winner on three core tenets, which have remained the same since the Prize was founded: excellence, originality and accessibility.
2024: Brotherless Night
V. V. Ganeshananthan
2023: Demon Copperhead
Barbara Kingsolver
2022: The Book of Form & Emptiness
Ruth Ozeki
2021: Piranesi
Susannah Clarke
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