Established in 1996 in the UK, after the 1991 Booker Prize shortlist featured no women, the Women’s Prize for Fiction was created to recognise the best novel written in English by a woman and published in Britain each year. Originally launched as the Orange Prize, it has become one of the most significant international literary awards, bringing sustained attention to women writers across borders and backgrounds — a mission reflected in this selection of eight shortlisted women of colour.
Future Sunday Bookshelf features will showcase each writer individually.
These authors come from across the globe — Trinidad, Turkey, the United States, Barbados, the Dominican Republic and the UK. Each novel here bears the mark of history: colonial inheritance, migration, racial fracture, domestic violence, communal memory.
Lisa Allen-Agostini
The Bread the Devil Knead
(Myriad, 2021)
Trinidadian author Lisa Allen-Agostini is a journalist, editor and writer of fiction and poetry. Her debut adult novel, The Bread the Devil Knead, set in Port-of-Spain, follows a woman trapped in an abusive marriage and is written in a supple mix of Trinidadian Creole and English. Long known for her newspaper columns and even stand-up comedy, Allen-Agostini reached a new international readership when the novel was shortlisted for the 2022 Women’s Prize. The recognition marked a decisive breakthrough for a writer long respected at home.
Elif Shafak
The Island of Missing Trees
(Bloomsbury, 2021)
Award-winning novelist Elif Shafak is a British-Turkish writer and public intellectual known for championing women’s rights and freedom of expression. The Island of Missing Trees, shortlisted in 2022, is a multi-generational story of love and loss set against the divided history of Cyprus. Blending political history with elements of folklore and magical realism, the novel explores memory and how it shapes the future. Shafak is also the author of The Bastard of Istanbul and 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2019.
Louise Erdrich
The Sentence
(HarperCollins/Harper, 2021)
Louise Erdrich, an American novelist of Ojibwe heritage, is one of the most celebrated figures in contemporary Native American literature. A Pulitzer Prize winner for The Night Watchman, she often centres Native characters and communities in fiction shaped by brutal histories. The Sentence, shortlisted for the 2022 Women’s Prize, is a ghost story set in Minneapolis during the COVID era. As in much of her work, the novel meditates on grief, responsibility and how the shadow of past brutality shapes the present.
Brit Bennett
The Vanishing Half (Atria, 2020)
Brit Bennett’s fiction probes race, identity and the fragile architectures of family life. The Vanishing Half, shortlisted in 2021, traces the diverging lives of twin sisters from 1950s Louisiana who choose to live on opposite sides of the colour line. The novel became a literary and cultural phenomenon, selected for Oprah’s Book Club and widely discussed for its nuanced portrayal of passing and self-invention. Bennett’s earlier novel, The Mothers, established her as a writer of gravitas.
Yaa Gyasi
Transcendent Kingdom (Knopf, 2020)
Born in Ghana and raised in the United States, Yaa Gyasi first drew acclaim with her debut, Homegoing. Her second novel, Transcendent Kingdom, shortlisted in 2021, follows a Ghanaian immigrant family in Alabama grappling with addiction, grief and scientific faith. The book moves between laboratory research and evangelical childhood, interrogating the limits of rational explanation in the face of loss. Gyasi’s work is frequently praised for its emotional clarity and political resonance.
Cherie Jones
How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House (Little, Brown, 2020)
Bajan writer Cherie Jones sets her debut novel in Bridgetown, Barbados, where private violence collides with public indifference. Shortlisted in 2021, How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House is a stark family saga shaped by poverty, gendered brutality and social constraint. The novel also won the Bocas Prize and was longlisted for the Booker, bringing wider attention to Caribbean women’s writing. The Women’s Prize judges praised its visceral, raw storytelling.
Angie Cruz
Dominicana (Flatiron, 2019)
Angie Cruz, born in New York City to Dominican immigrant parents, writes with acute insight into migration and female agency. Dominicana, shortlisted in 2020, follows a teenage girl who leaves the Bronx after marrying an older man and relocates to the Dominican Republic in the 1960s. The novel is an intimate portrait of coercion and meditation on displacement and agency, or rather, the lack of it. Cruz’s earlier novel, Let It Rain Coffee, similarly explored Dominican diasporic life.
Bernardine Evaristo
Girl, Woman, Other (Hamish Hamilton, 2019)
Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other, shortlisted for the Women’s Prize in 2020, went on to win the Booker Prize in 2019, making her the first Black woman to receive that honour. The novel follows 12 interconnected Black British women across generations, moving between voices in a fluid, hybrid form. Evaristo has since become one of the most influential literary figures in Britain, recognised for expanding the imaginative possibilities of the contemporary English novel.
This list is by no means exhaustive. Yet taken together, these eight writers demonstrate the range and depth of contemporary fiction shaped by diaspora, memory and racial history. From Barbadian streets to Cypriot orchards, from Midwestern bookshops to Trinidadian kitchens, these novels, by exposing the private lives and hurts of women, also expose the systems that perpetuate them.
