5 Award-winning Female Authors to be Inspired By
This International Women’s Day, we’d like to shine a spotlight on some of the award-winning female authors who have been turning pages in the literary scene around the world! From Poland to America to our very own shores in Singapore, here are five female authors you should look out for in your next read:
1. Olga Tokarczuk Winner of The Nobel Prize for Literature (2018)
Olga Tokarczuk won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2018 “for a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life”. A well-known author from Poland, Tokarczuk started writing fiction seriously after she completed her studies in psychology at the University of Warsaw. Two of her award-winning works are Flights and The Books of Jacob, both of which have been translated into English. The latter is a whopping 900-page novel divided into 7 books, following the journey of Jacob Frank, a real-life Polish Jew who believed himself to be the Messiah.
2. Donna Tartt Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (2014)
Donna Tartt’s first novel, The Secret History, was published when she was just 29. The book quickly became an international bestseller and won the praise of several major literary critics, magazines and newspapers, establishing Tartt as a literary prodigy. Three decades later, Tartt published her third novel, The Goldfinch, earning her The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2014. The story, which “combines unforgettably vivid characters, mesmerizing language, and breathtaking suspense”, follows the coming-of-age journey of a terrorist attack survivor and an important piece of painting that he took with him during the attack.
3. Maggie O'Farrell Winner of the Women's Prize for Fiction (2020)
Maggie O’Farrell’s book, Hamnet, became the most recent winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2020. If the novel’s title sounds familiar, that’s because it is based on the often-footnoted accounts of Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet, who died at age 11 in 1596. Martha Lane Fox, chair of the Women’s Prize for Fiction judging panel, chose this novel for its expression of “something profound about the human experience that seems both extraordinarily current and at the same time, enduring”. This is not O’Farrell’s first award win. She has written eight novels so far – many of them to critical acclaim.
4. Margaret Atwood Co-winner of The Booker Prize (2019)
If you’ve read Margaret Atwood’s bestselling novel The Handmaid’s Tale, then you’ll enjoy its sequel, The Testaments, which also happens to be 2019’s co-winner of The Booker Prize. Aged 81, Atwood is no stranger to literary awards; her extensive body of work has earned her the Los Angeles Times Fiction Award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award for best Science Fiction and the Trillium Book Award among others. One of her best-selling works, The Handmaid’s Tale, has been adapted into an ongoing, award-winning TV series by Hulu. Apart from writing, Atwood is also the inventor of the LongPen, a remote signing device that allows a person to remotely write in ink anywhere in the world via tablet PC, the Internet and a robotic hand.
5. Akshita Nanda Co-winner of the Singapore Literature Prize 2020
Last on our list is a local author and winner of the 2020 Singapore Literature Prize award! Akshita Nanda was born in Pune, India in 1979 and has lived in Singapore since 1995. She is a long-time journalist with The Straits Times, currently writing about the arts. Nimita’s Place is her first novel, and won her the Singapore Literature Prize in 2020 (along with co-winner Ng Yi-Sheng). The novel is an inter-generational dual narrative about two women who walk divergent paths but face the same quandaries about identity and home. A year after Nimita’s Place, Nanda published Beauty Queens of Bishan, a light-hearted story about how Indian families in Singapore all come together in the beauty parlours of the average-class heartland of Bishan.
Supporting greater female representation in the literary world
According to Quartz, women authors continue to be underrepresented in literary awards. Female winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature, for example, make up only 12% of all winners until 2016. Nevertheless, the statistics are improving, and we hope that by spotlighting these great writers, we can contribute to a more equitable gender representation in the literary world.
Graph source: Quartz
We’ve tried to keep this list to some of the more recent award-winners, but we’re sure you have your own favourite authors. Whether it’s a novelist who knows how to deal with the female perspective, or a female writer who has inspired you, head over to our instagram and let us know who your favourite female writer is in the comments!