American author Barbara Kingsolver has been announced as the winner of this year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction with her tenth novel, Demon Copperhead. It is a heartfelt, gritty, poignant novel set in the Appalachian mountains in Virginia, USA. A reimagining of Dickens’ David Copperfield for modern times, it tells the story of the relentless struggles and triumphs of a young boy born into poverty as he navigates foster care, labour exploitation, addiction, love and loss, while grappling with his invisibility in a culture that neglects rural communities.
At an awards ceremony in Bedford Square Gardens, central London – hosted by novelist, playwright and Women’s Prize Founder Director Kate Mosse – the 2023 Chair of Judges, Louise Minchin, presented the author with the £30,000 prize, endowed by an anonymous donor, and the ‘Bessie’, a limited-edition bronze figurine by Grizel Niven.
The Women’s Prize for Fiction – the greatest international celebration of women’s creativity masterminded by the registered charity the Women’s Prize Trust – honours outstanding, ambitious, original fiction written in English by women from anywhere in the world. More information can be found here.
Chair of Judges and author and journalist Louise Minchin says:
Barbara Kingsolver has written a towering, deeply powerful and significant book. In a year of outstanding fiction by women, we made a unanimous decision on Demon Copperhead as our winner. Brilliant and visceral, it is storytelling by an author at the top of her game. We were all deeply moved by Demon, his gentle optimism, resilience and determination despite everything being set against him.
An exposé of modern America, its opioid crisis and the detrimental treatment of deprived and maligned communities, Demon Copperhead tackles universal themes – from addiction and poverty, to family, love, and the power of friendship and art – it packs a triumphant emotional punch, and it is a novel that will withstand the test of time.
About the Book
Demon Copperhead is set in the mountains of southern Appalachia in the US. It’s the story of a boy born to a teenage single mother in a trailer park, with no assets beyond his dead father’s good looks and copper-coloured hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival. In a plot that never pauses for breath, relayed in his own unsparing voice, he braves the modern perils of foster care, child labour, derelict schools, athletic success, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses. Through all of it, he reckons with his own invisibility in a popular culture where even the superheroes have abandoned rural people in favour of cities.
On the novel, her second to win the Women’s Prize for Fiction, Barbara Kingsolver said:
Mine is a modern retelling of David Copperfield, which Dickens wrote to protest the ravages of poverty on the children of his time. I wrote mine for the same reason. It was challenging and also fun to transpose Victorian characters and situations to my own place and time: a boarding school for indigent boys becomes a beleaguered tobacco farm where foster boys are brought in to do unpaid labor. A shoe-black factory is a meth lab. The dangerous friend Steerforth is now ‘Fast Forward’, a high school football star with a narcissistic streak.
Find out what the six reading groups who were selected to read the shortlist thought of this year’s titles including Demon Copperhead in our review article.
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