His comments came after Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk was awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize for Literature – making her only the 15th woman to be given the award. Tokarczuk had also been awarded the 2018 Man Booker International Prize for her novel Flights. Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, another of her books, has also been widely lauded by critics.

So why, given how critically successful Tokarczuk is, as well as the success of numerous other female novelists, does Olsson think it’s only now, in 2019, that women are beginning to produce great work?

It could partly be because the women writers have generally been valued less than their male counterparts, as research in 2018 showed. Women’s fiction has also often been derided with the use of the term ’chick lit’, and women writing stories about family are often said to be penning ‘domestic fiction’ while men who tackle the same topics are writing ‘state of the nation’ books.

Tokarczuk is an outspoken feminist in her own country, and the judging committee described her as “a writer preoccupied by local life but looking at earth from above… her work is full of wit and cunning”. The committee also praised her “narrative imagination that with encyclopaedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life.” Tokarczuk will be awarded a diploma and medal, as well as a prize of £746,678.

The fact that a woman author was awarded the prize is not entirely unsurprising. The prize committee had recently been embroiled in several years worth of scandal after a member was accused and subsequently convicted of rape. It had also been criticised widely for its focus on male authors, as well as those from Scandinavian and other Northern European countries.

Great female writers are nothing new – what’s new is recognition