Helen Lederer launches prize for funny female writers

The Comedy women in print award is a response to how few female authors have won the Wodehouse prize

The Women’s prize for fiction was famously set up in response to the Booker prize failing to shortlist any female authors in 1991. Two decades on, a new award celebrating the funniest novels by women has been announced, in the wake of a sexism row over the Wodehouse prize for comic fiction.

Awarded each year at the Hay literary festival, the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize has gone to three female authors in 18 years: Helen Fielding, Marina Lewycka and Hannah Rothschild. Earlier this summer, the bestselling novelist Marian Keyes laid into the Wodehouse – previously the UK’s only prize for funny fiction – for its “sexist imbalance”.

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