Women's Prize for Fiction

The Women's Prize for Fiction was founded in 1996 to correct the uneven attention and respect given to women writers compared with men. It is run by the Women's Prize Trust, a registered charity in the United Kingdom, and goes each year to an original novel written in English by a woman and published in the UK. The winner receives £30,000, which comes from an anonymous endowment, along with a bronze statuette called the Bessie that the artist Grizel Niven created and gave to the prize.

Each year a panel of five women judges reads the novels entered by UK publishers, weighing them on the same three standards used since the start: excellence, originality and accessibility. The judges name a longlist of sixteen in March, reduce it to a shortlist of six in late April, and announce the winner in June at a summer event in London. The trust also runs a companion Women's Prize for Non-Fiction.

Original novels written in English by women and published in the United Kingdom, entered by their UK publishers.