To celebrate the first year of the Baileys sponsorship of the Women’s Prize for Fiction, Baileys has commissioned acclaimed portrait photographer, Suki Dhanda, to photograph the 2014 judging panel.

The panel has been announced today as Mary Beard, Professor of Classics at the University of Cambridge, writer Denise Mina, Times columnist, author and screenwriter, Caitlin Moran and BBC broadcaster and journalist, Sophie Raworth. The panel will be chaired by former Managing Director of Penguin Books UK and Chief Executive of the Girls’ Day School Trust, Helen Fraser.

“I am delighted to be chairing the Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction,” commented Helen Fraser. “It is a fantastic quartet of judges, and I am looking forward enormously to beginning on our journey of engaging with some extraordinary minds and extraordinary voices.”

Every year, a panel of five women, all passionate readers and highly successful and inspiring women, are selected to judge the prize.

The Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction is the UK’s most prestigious annual book award for fiction written by a woman. Now in its nineteenth year*, the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction was set up to celebrate excellence and originality in writing by women throughout the world.

The judges between them will be reading more than 150 books over the next six months as they look to crown the next winner. Previous winners of the prize include A.M. Homes for May We Be Forgiven (2013) and Zadie Smith for On Beauty (2006).

Any woman writing in English – whatever her nationality, country of residence, age or subject matter – is eligible.

The winner will receive a cheque for £30,000 and a limited edition bronze figurine known as a ‘Bessie’, created and donated by the artist Grizel Niven. Both are anonymously endowed.

The Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction 2014 will be awarded on June 4th 2014 at the Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre, London.