Naomi Alderman

Alderman grew up in a mostly Orthodox Jewish household in Hendon, north London, the daughter of the historian Geoffrey Alderman; her debut novel, Disobedience, about a lesbian rabbi's daughter returning to that world, won the Orange Award for New Writers.

Alongside fiction she built a career in game design, co-creating the bestselling fitness app Zombies, Run! and working as lead writer on the alternate-reality game Perplex City; Margaret Atwood mentored her early career through the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative.

The Power (2016), her fourth novel, imagines an inverted gender hierarchy after teenage girls develop the ability to discharge electric shocks; it won the Women's Prize, was named a book of the year by both Barack Obama and Bill Gates, and became an Amazon Prime television series.