Naomi Alderman has won the 2017 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction for her feminist science fiction novel, The Power.

Set in a future where women develop the power to kill men with a touch, The Power is a page-turning thriller that explores timely issues, including gender politics and questions of power. The chair of judges, film and TV producer Tessa Ross, says: ‘This prize celebrates great writing and great ideas and The Power had that, but it also had urgency and resonance.’ She predicted the novel would be ‘a classic of the future’.

An early advocate for Alderman’s novel, our digital marketing manager Lian Hingee adds her praise to that of the Prize judges’: ‘Full of observations on gender politics, power, religion and violence, The Power is also a rip-roaring, fast paced thriller. It’s sly, smart, terrifying – the perfect antidote to a post-Trump world.’

The Power is the first science fiction novel to win the Baileys prize for women’s fiction. This genre has become increasingly popular over the past months with classics such as George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale re-entering bestsellers lists. A science fiction novel – Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad – also recently won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Alderman has previously won the Orange Award for New Writers for her debut novel, Disobedience in 2006. The Power is her fourth book.

As the winner of the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction, Alderman receives prize money of £30,000 and a limited edition bronze known as a ‘Bessie’, created and donated by the artist Grizel Niven. Both are anonymously endowed.