Judging Major Book Prizes

What's it like to judge a major book prize? Surrounded by a group of serious-minded fellow judges with strong opinions of their own, wider potential considerations, media intrusion - and all while trying to get through dozens of books in a short time. Join our esteemed panel of experts to hear the inside story on the the biggest literary prizes, including the Booker, Women's, Climate, Baillie Gifford and English PEN awards.

Kit de Waal chaired the Women's Prize for Fiction judging panel in 2025 and is judging the 2026 Climate Fiction Prize. She is the author of the novels THE BEST OF EVERYTHING, MY NAME IS LEON (shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award and won the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year,) THE TRICK TO TIME (longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction), a short story collection, SUPPORTING CAST, and a memoir, WITHOUT WARNING & ONLY SOMETIMES (a Radio 4 Book of the Week and shortlisted for Biography of the Year at the Irish Book Awards). She is also editor of the COMMON PEOPLE anthology, and co-founder of the Big Book Weekend festival. MY NAME IS LEON was adapted as a film for BBC Two. Professor  Kit de Waal is the Jean Humphreys Writer in Residence at the University of Leicester and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Andrew Holgate was Literary Editor of The Sunday Times for 14 years until 2022, and Deputy Literary Editor for nine years before that. During his editorship he ran two prizes - the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award and the Sunday Times Short Story Award - and also judged several others, including the Baillie Gifford prize for non-fiction, which he chaired in 2021. His book on Mussolini’s execution and the controversies that surround it, Death of a Dictator, will be published in spring 2027

Elleke Boehmer is Professor of World Literature in English at the University of Oxford, and Executive Director of the Oxford Centre for Life Writing. A previous International Booker prize judge, Elleke is the author of a wide range of publications, including Migrant Metaphors (1995, 2005), Indian Arrivals (ESSE prizewinner 2016); Postcolonial Poetics (2018), and Nelson Mandela (2008, 2023). She is the author of six novels, including The Shouting in the Dark (Olive Schreiner Prize-winner 2019), Screens Against the Sky (1990), Ice Shock (2026), and the short story collections, Sharmilla (2010) and To the Volcano (2019). In 2025-26, Elleke published a trio of books about the ‘far southern edge of the world’, including, most recently, Southern Imagining (Princeton), and, shortly, Ice Shock. She is an Elected Fellow of the Australian Humanities Academy, of the Royal Society of Literature, and of the Royal Historical Society. Since 2023, she has been an Extraordinary Professor in English at the University of Pretoria.

Clare Anderson is Professor of History and Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Leicester. Clare has been on both sides of the judging process: in 2024, Clare’s book, Convicts: a global history, won the Social History Society Book Prize and the Australian Historical Association’s Kay Daniels Prize. The same year, she was a judge for the English PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize, awarded annually for a non-fiction book of specifically historical content. She works on the colonial history of punishment and empire, including its aftermaths in former colonies now. Clare has a particular interest in unfree labour in British Guiana and Mauritius and has enjoyed working with the descendants of enslaved convicts transported to the Australian penal colonies during the first half of the nineteenth century. Over the past decade she has also led interdisciplinary work on prisons, drugs and mental health, which has included collaborations in Guyana, Barbados, Jamaica, Trinidad & Tobago, Mauritius and Seychelles. 

Photo credit: Sarah M. Lee

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