V V Ganeshananthan and Naomi Klein triumph as Women's Prize winners

Ganeshananthan triumphed over fellow shortlistees Anne Enright, Claire Kilroy, Isabella Hammad, Kate Grenville and Aube Rey Lescure.

The Women’s Prize for Fiction 2024 has been awarded to American author V V Ganeshananthan for her “masterpiece of historical fiction", Brotherless Night (Viking).

Meanwhile, The Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction was awarded in its first year to Canadian author and activist Naomi Klein, for Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World (Allen Lane). The results mean books published by Penguin Random House scooped both awards on the night.

Ganeshananthan’s novel, published by Viking, arrived almost 15 years after her debut, Love Marriage (W&N), was longlisted for the Women’s Prize in 2008. Brotherless Night is set mostly in Jaffna, Sri Lanka, depicting a family fractured by civil war told from the first-person perspective of a young woman, Sashi, who wants to be a doctor but whose ambitions are thwarted by civil unrest and whose brothers join the Tamil Tiger militants.

In its 29th year, Ganeshananthan was awarded the Women’s Prize bronze statuette, known as the “Bessie”, at a live ceremony in Bedford Square Gardens, central London tonight, with judges hailing the author’s “clear-eyed moral scrutiny” and “spellbinding storytelling".

Ganeshananthan triumphed over fellow shortlistees Anne Enright, Claire Kilroy, Isabella Hammad, Kate Grenville and Aube Rey Lescure. She takes home a cheque for £30,000 along with a trophy created and donated by the artist Grizel Niven.

Canadian author and activist Naomi Klein won the inaugural Non-Fiction Award for Doppelganger, an exploration of truth and polarisation in politics prompted by her experience of being repeatedly confused with the author Naomi Wolf.