Martha Lane Fox

What attracted you to judging the Orange Prize for Fiction?
It's a great honour, I was very flattered to be asked. Not only do I love reading, but I think that, unfortunately, we still have to champion women writers.

For both reasons it was very, very nice to be asked.


What’s the most enjoyable aspect of the judging process?
I've really enjoyed our sessions when we've got together, because it can be quite a lonely process when you're reading and you're thinking about a book, it's great to have the opportunity then to discuss it in detail with people.

But, at the same time, it's been enormously indulgent being able to take the time to read so many novels back-to-back. It felt like a treat, even if it's been quite tricky at times.


The most challenging?
Making sure you do each book justice. When you're reading a lot, quite quickly, one book after the other, you want to make sure that your brain doesn't become confused and characters don't dance in between the novels. So, doing each book justice and keeping as many factors as neutral as you can, so that your mood, or your environment, or whatever you've just done doesn't influence how you see the book.


How differently do you read when you’re judging to when you’re reading for pleasure?
I try not to read that differently, because I think that it's important that we are not selecting books based on anything more than how other people would approach them. One of the key criteria of the Orange Prize is accessibility. So I read them carefully, and obviously in a slightly different way, but tried to read them how I would've picked them up and read them normally.

Although I don't make notes about every book I read, normally!


How did reading so many novels in such a short time affect you?
I think it affected my boyfriend more than me! I actually found it harder going from the longlist to the shortlist, because it was a shorter space of time and I was working more. So that was a bit more tricky to manage. But I think that the main thing is just having all those different people dancing around in my head – and all the different stories. Sometimes I got confused about whether I was in 1950s England, or 1920s Japan, or Afghanistan in 2001. I had to keep separating out the strands that I read


Anything else you’d like to tell website visitors?
I have to say that I've been shocked. I've been going into every bookseller that I've passed on the high street since doing the judging, just to see the lay of the land.

And pretty much universally, when I've looked at the recommended tables, shelves, stands, which I'm assuming is where most people go when they first head into a book shop, women writers are in a minority– and very often in a tiny minority.

I can categorically say, having just read all of those books in a short space of time, there are equally as many good female writers as male writers. The situation I found in book stores is shabby and shocking.