The 2019 Women’s Prize for fiction was presented to American novelist Tayari Jones for her fourth novel An American Marriage.

Speaking at the Women’s Prize awards party, Jones said that she wanted to address too many things that were in her head and that is why it took her six years to finish writing the book. “I wanted to write about the intersection of questions of incarceration but also gender and modern life,” she added.

Jones’s primary objective of writing An American Marriage was to present a “feminist novel that looks at feminism and also this wrongful incarceration which primarily affects men”. She also commended her fellow writers in the short list, saying that she felt like there’s a “renaissance of women’s writing”.