June 3, 2025, 7:01pm

Today, the Women’s Prize Trust announced Bernardine Evaristo as the recipient of the Women’s Prize Outstanding Contribution Award, a unique prize meant to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Women’s Prize for Fiction.

All authors who had been previously longlisted, shortlisted or had won the Women’s Prize for Fiction, and who had published a minimum of five books, were eligible for the award. “My fellow judges and I always knew it would be a tall order to choose just one author from the many exceptional contemporary writers who have made such a huge contribution in a world where women’s voices are increasingly being silenced, where the arts and artists are under attack,” said Women’s Prizes Founder Director Kate Mosse in a statement.

In the end, we felt that Bernardine Evaristo’s beautiful, ambitious and inventive body of work (which includes plays, poetry, essays, monologues and memoir as well as award-winning fiction), her dazzling skill and imagination, and her courage to take risks and offer readers a pathway into diverse and multifarious worlds over a forty-year career, made her the ideal recipient of the Women’s Prize Outstanding Contribution Award. Significantly, Evaristo has consistently used her own magnificent achievements and exceptional talent as a springboard to create opportunities for others, to promote unheard and under-heard women’s voices and to ensure that every female writer feels she has a conduit for her talent. Congratulations to Bernardine and a huge thank you to my fellow judges for such a joyous and celebratory process.

Evaristo will receive £100,000 and a special sculpture by Caroline Russell, both of which will be presented on June 12th at the Women’s Prize Trust’s summer party in London.