Lady writers on the PC: The Orange Prize for Fiction

The Orange Prize for Fiction (now the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction) is an annual event. As is the criticism it attracts. This year’s detractor is the writer and journalist Tim Lott.

Fair to say, I don’t agree with his views about the Orange Prize- you can read them here – in the online version of the Telegraph.

I wrote about the Orange Prize two years ago and noted how despite the apparent fanfare, the award doesn’t get much media attention. By this, I mean prime time TV coverage. Like the Man Booker Prize or the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction.

In 2006, you had to sit in front of your computer screen if you wanted to see the winner. It looks like you’ll be doing the same this year. In which case, I stand by every word I wrote two years ago. Here is an edited extract.

It is the evening of June 6th 2006 and you are (as ever) in front of your computer screen. For once, it is not words that hold you captive but the swank and sway of evening dress and anticipation. You are watching a live transmission from inside the Royal Courts of Justice as one woman gets what she deserves: a cheque for £30,000 and a bronze "Bessie" figurine for the mantelpiece.

The woman is the 11th recipient of the Orange Prize for Fiction and, like last year's winner, Lionel Shriver, her acceptance speech, and any tears of joy have just come streaming to you as a webcast. Unlike the winner's novel, this is not fiction: it is the modern media take on keeping women writers in the picture.

Back in 1979, Dire Straits were singing about the 'lady writer on the TV'. Well we had seen glimpses of her. Melvyn Bragg's Sunday night programme, Read All About It, brought novelists like Jacky Gillot in front of the camera. And the lady writers were winning prizes for their fiction that year too. Penelope Fitzgerald won the Booker prize for her novel Offshore and Fay Weldon was shortlisted for Praxis. A Whitbread Literary Award (as it was then known) went to Jennifer Johnston for The Old Jest. The lady writers had, it seemed, arrived amid the techno-glory of colour television.

But by the early 1990s, there were rumblings that if the ladies weren't exactly vanishing they seemed to be slipping off the winners' podium. The Booker Prize had gone to only four woman novelists since Penelope Fitzgerald's victory. The Whitbread had had women winners twice. Why, puzzled some in the publishing industry was wonderful writing by women not getting its award-winning dues?

Perhaps a new prize was needed to let women writers stand tall on the literary landscape? Grand artistic ideals often need a little bureaucracy to help them flourish. Between 1992 and 1995, a committee was formed, an endowment found and sponsorship secured. In May 1996, Helen Dunmore became the first winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction, for A Spell of Winter.

The Orange Prize for Fiction is awarded to a woman writer, of any nationality, for an original, full-length novel written in English and published in the United Kingdom during the previous year. It is now a prestigious literary prize and attracts the attention of both established and new writers.

This brings us back to the awards ceremony, which regretably you will not be able to watch on your TV. "The revolution," as Gil Scott-Heron told us, "will not be televised", and the Orange Prize remains an ongoing literary revolution. It was bloody at its inception and for some remains symbolic of literary weakness and not strength.

Fortunately, communications (like revolutions) evolve, and the internet has electronically enfranchised us all. On June 6th, one click on the Orange Prize website will, for the second consecutive year, enable anyone in the world to watch a real-time celebration of excellent women's writing and some fine lady writers.