The Women’s Prize has revealed the judges for its 2027 awards.
Merve Emre will serve as chair of the Women’s Prize for Fiction judging panel. Emre, a literary critic and the author of books including The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing, is a past winner of the National Book Critics Circle’s Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing.
She will be joined on the jury by podcaster Charlotte Collins, novelist Esther Freud (Hideous Kinky), poet Theresa Lola, and author Eimear McBride (A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing).
The Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction jury will be chaired by Susie Dent, a lexicographer and author of books including Guilty by Definition.
Joining Dent on the judging panel will be historian and author Shrabani Basu (Spy Princess: The Life of Noor Inayat Khan), BBC journalist Reeta Chakrabarti, television host Sophie Morgan, and podcaster Emma Reed Turrell.
Claire Shanahan, executive director of the Women’s Prize Trust, said in a statement, “These judges understand the brief entirely: to collectively select 32 exceptional books and create the ultimate reading list; to celebrate the talented writers behind the books; and to help place their writing into the hands of millions of readers around the world. This speaks to the heart of the Women’s Prize Trust’s mission, and our belief in the power of women’s voices to entertain, to inform and to inspire change.”
The longlist for the fiction prize will be announced on March 10, with the shortlist following on April 28, while the nonfiction longlist will be revealed on Feb. 10 with the shortlist announcement coming on April 7. The winners of both awards will be announced at a ceremony in London on June 17.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
