The Orange Prize is holding a vote on the best books of all time by women writers. “But 50 Best Books by women? The old arguments that greeted the establishment of the Orange Prize itself are immediately unrolled for another airing: chiefly, that women are not a minority group and good writing transcends boundaries of gender, therefore to treat women writers as belonging to a separate category serves to perpetuate divisions rather than address and erase them. The notion of a literary prize exclusively for white writers or, indeed, for men, is untenable, so the defence for a women-only prize must be that we consider ourselves sidelined. Is it still true that women writers are undervalued?”