I am a literary award freak. I love the Booker Prize, the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the P. G. Wodehouse Prize… And I have followed The Women’s Prize through three incarnations, since its inception in 1996. First it was the Orange Prize, sponsored by the Orange company, then the Bailey Prize, sponsored by Bailey Irish Cream, and finally The Women’s Prize, which has a fluctuating cast of sponsors.

I read the first Orange Prize winner before I knew of the award. I came across Helen Dunmore’s elegant novel A Spell of Winter, and subsequently read each of her books. When I learned about the Orange Prize, I managed to keep up with what I called finalists, i.e., the shortlist. But the longlist will be announced March 2 for super-fans.

I have read more of the shortlisted novels than I have the winners. I did not realize that until I looked up the winners list tonight. But here are three of my favorite Orange Prize-shortlisted books: Julia Blackburn’s The Leper’s Companion, shortlisted in 1998; Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, shortlisted in 2000; and Jane Gardam’s Old Filth, shortlisted in 2005.

And now for three novels that I consider Women’s Prize-worthy this year. Whether they’ll make the longlist I do not guarantee. Wait, have I just been named a special judge as a reader of classics in the U.S,? Oh, did I hear that wrong? Too bad! I was looking forward to wearing my Book Woman t-shirt and carrying my Villette bag.

And Here are Three for My 2025 Women’s Prize Wish List

Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake. The cold-blooded narrator of Creation Lake, a literary thriller, is a failed government spy, now working as an industrial spy. Sadie Smith, as she calls herself, has an eerily detached personality: she deals in manipulation, subterfuge, and betrayal. Her one saving grace: she loves and respects Bruno Lacombe’s lyrical emails to the radical Pascal Balmy, her employer’s targeted enemy. Bruno, Pascal’s former mentor, has given up politics to investigate the latest findings on Neanderthals, whose DNA in very small amounts, he says, may still survive in some humans.
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Jessica Anthony’s The Most. In this spare, elegant novel, set on a November day in 1957, an ill-suited married couple reflect on emotional numbness. Kathleen, a former college tennis star, now a housewife, whimsically decides to swim in the apartment complex pool. Then she refuses to get out. Her gorgeous husband, Virgil, a failure in the insurance business, tries to hold it all together: he pleads with her to come inside and look after their sons, because he is required on Sundays to golf with his colleagues and network on the golf course. A melancholy book about marriage, failure, and regrets.

Sarah Perry’s Enlightenment. This brilliant novel, told partly in documents, goes back and forth in time between the 21st century and the 19th century. Thomas Hart, a newspaper columnist, has always been fascinated by Lowlands House, reputed to be haunted, where a woman disappeared in the 19th century. When a museum director gives him the woman’s diary, Thomas discovers that they shared a common interest: he is an amateur astronomer and she was an astronomer who discovered a comet. The third character is Grace Macaulay, whom he mentored when she was young, but she ran away to London after he interfered with her love affair with an unsuitable boy. Twenty years later Thomas and Grace reconnect, partly because of the woman who vanished from Lowlands House. But much goes on before everyone is reconciled.

Are you a Women’s Prize fan? Which is your favorite winner? Mine is the first winner, Helen Dunmore’s A Spell of Winter. I also recommend Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi.