Women’s Prize shortlisted author of The History of Love and Great House, Nicole Krauss, joins the inaugural selection panel for Originators, the Women’s Prize Trust’s mentorship and development program dedicated to supporting emerging women fiction writers from across the United States, presented by CHANEL.
Ahead of the program closing for applications on Monday, November 30, 2026, we caught up with Nicole to hear more about her approach to writing, favourite authors and what she’s looking for in the work she reads.
Who are some of your favourite women writing today?
Everything Jenny Erpenbeck has published in the last 20 years has been extraordinary. Solvej Balle’s project, The Calculation of Volume, is fascinating. I also very much admired Nathalie Léger’s Suite for Barbara Loden, Noemi Lefebvre’s Blue Self-Portrait, and Tender by Ariana Harwicz.
Could you reveal a secret or something surprising about your creative process?
Because my books are improvised, I never know where they are going until I arrive there. Needless to say, this approach invites a fair amount of anxiety. I never know whether the novel will work out. But going about it this way means that the writing always allows for enormous discovery, for the experience of things coming to light. It becomes a journey that I am on alongside the reader. And that contract seems fairer to me, more respectful, than if I were to know everything in advance, and lead the reader along as if on a kind of leash. I can always feel in a book when the writer is figuring it out as she goes; there is an exhilarating sense of being aware of failure, of things falling apart. But there is also a dynamism, an openness to whatever may come, to needing to respond at any moment, to switch course, evolve, or change her mind about the things she thought she believed.
What is your advice for someone at the beginning of their writing journey?
Always pursue a sense of maximal freedom in your work—it will allow you to keep at this otherwise difficult vocation without losing hope or interest. And allow your readers a sense of freedom, too: trust them to understand and make connections for themselves. Don’t hold onto too tightly to your plans; let the writing take you beyond the horizon of what you started out able to see.
As a member of the selection panel, what are your looking for in an application for Originators?
A writer willing to take risks, whose prose channels both thoughtfulness and charisma. A writer attuned to the musicality of language, who believes in the possibility of work that doesn’t sacrifice either feeling or intellect, but sees how both are powerful and necessary.
