Equality battle: Best-selling author Joanna Trollope makes a case for keeping a female-only book prize after Orange pulls out of its support for the gong
A few days ago, a peach of a sponsorship came back on the market.
Orange, which has been terrific sponsors of the top women’s prize for fiction in the UK for 17 years, is giving up its support to concentrate on film, and I foresee a competitive rush to replace the company.
Why? Because this is a valuable prize for sponsors – worth in excess of £17 million in promotional value last year alone – and it is a prize that readers love, the book trade loves, and which has produced more classy, readable and thought-provoking winners than any other literary prize in this country (only one Man Booker prize victor, Yann Martel’s The Life Of Pi, has outsold Orange’s top three winners).
What about Rose Tremain, Marilynne Robinson, Lionel Shriver, Zadie Smith and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, to name but five recipients?
The £30,000 Orange Prize is awarded to the best, most original, most accessible novel by a woman anywhere in the world, as long as it is published in English in the UK, in the given year. It was founded by women, is produced, promoted and administered by women, and is judged by them too.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2150539/Women-buy-thirds-books-sold-Britain--literary-world-male-chauvinist-bastion.html#ixzz1w9gLpKtW