Naomi Alderman

British novelist and game designer whose The Power — imagining a world where women develop the ability to electrocute men — won the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction.

Naomi Alderman is a British novelist and game designer whose speculative fiction has placed her among the most inventive and provocative writers working in English today. She first came to wide notice with Disobedience, a novel about an Orthodox Jewish community in north London, but it was The Power, published in 2016, that made her an international name: a science fiction novel imagining a world in which women develop the ability to deliver electrical shocks, upending millennia of gender-based power dynamics.

The Power is structured as a historical document from a future where matriarchy is the norm, presenting itself as a “historical novel” about the transition period when the power structure shifted. As women across the world discover and develop their new capability, the consequences ripple through politics, religion, culture, and individual lives in ways that are sometimes utopian, sometimes horrifying, and always thought-provoking. The book won the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction and was shortlisted for numerous other awards, and has been adapted for television.

Alderman mentored Margaret Atwood through a writing program, and Atwood’s influence — the dystopian feminist speculation, the historical document framing — is evident in The Power, though Alderman’s voice is entirely her own. She is also a successful video game designer, having created Zombies, Run!, one of the most successful fitness gaming apps ever made. The intersection of game design and narrative fiction informs her thinking about how stories motivate behavior and construct reality — themes that run through all her work.