Suggestions that winners of major literary prizes have benefitted from their gender is insulting to the judges, to the prizes and most of all, to the writers
Gaia Vince won the prestigious Royal Society Book Prize in 2015 for her outstanding travelogue ‘Adventures in the Anthropocene: A Journey to the Heart of the Planet we Made’. She was the first woman to win outright in the prize’s 28-year history. The 2016 prize went to Andrea Wulf for her book ‘The Invention of Nature’. Reflecting on these writer’s successes in Friday’s Guardian, associate media editor Jon Dugdale made a number of insidious insinuations that I wish to correct with bald facts as my allies.
I was honored to be on the jury in 2015. It was chaired by the mathematician Ian Stewart, and my fellow judges included the novelist Sarah Waters, the Guardian’s book editor Claire Armitstead, Channel 4 journalist Krishnan Guru-Murthy, and scientist Jo Shien Ng.
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