Barbara Kingsolver has won the 2023 Women’s prize for fiction, making her the first person to win the award twice in its 28-year history.
Kingsolver was chosen as the winner for her Pulitzer prize-winning novel Demon Copperhead, which is set in the Appalachian mountains in Virginia in the US, and is a reimagining of Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield. It follows the title character as he navigates foster care, labour exploitation, addiction and more in a culture that neglects rural communities.
The writer previously won the prize in 2010 for The Lacuna. She was also shortlisted in 2013 for Flight Behaviour. The Women’s prize, worth £30,000, is awarded for the best full-length novel of the year written by a woman and published in the UK.
This year’s judging panel was chaired by broadcaster and writer Louise Minchin, who was joined by novelist Rachel Joyce, journalist, podcaster and writer Bella Mackie, novelist and short story writer Irenosen Okojie and Labour MP Tulip Siddiq.
Minchin called Demon Copperhead a “towering, deeply powerful and significant book” and an “exposé of modern America, its opioid crisis and the detrimental treatment of deprived and maligned communities”.
The judges unanimously decided on Kingsolver’s novel as the winner, with Minchin saying the panel was “deeply moved by Demon, his gentle optimism, resilience and determination despite everything being set against him”.
Demon Copperhead, said Minchin, “packs a triumphant emotional punch, and it is a novel that will withstand the test of time”.
Reviewing the book in the Guardian, Elizabeth Lowry said Demon Copperhead “feels in many ways like the book” Kingsolver was “born to write”.
The shortlist included debut novelists Jacqueline Crooks for Fire Rush, Louise Kennedy for Trespasses and Priscilla Morris for Black Butterflies, as well as former winner Maggie O’Farrell, shortlisted for The Marriage Portrait. The shortlist was completed by Pod by Laline Paull, who was previously shortlisted for the prize in 2015 for her novel The Bees.
The bestselling book on the shortlist is O’Farrell’s The Marriage Portrait, which sold 72,819 copies by the first week of June, according to trade magazine The Bookseller. Demon Copperhead was the third bestselling of the Women’s prize shortlist, after Kennedy’s Trespasses.
The 2022 prize was won by Ruth Ozeki for The Book of Form and Emptiness. In addition to a fiction prize, the Women’s prize has this year launched a nonfiction prize, which will be awarded for the first time in 2024.
To explore all the titles on the shortlist visit guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
