How reassuring that thrillers (and redheads) haven’t changed

I have good reason to know that you must never say yes when someone asks you to judge a literary prize. In 2004 some temporary lack of sanity made me believe that it was possible to read 130 novels (for the Man Booker Prize) while nursing a baby. So I was poised to flee in horror when asked if I might consider assessing 78 manuscripts for the Lucy Cavendish College Fiction Prize, but there were sound reasons for acquiescence.

First, there is Lucy (as its alumnae call it) itself. When I moved to Cambridge and walked past the college gates, I said to my husband it was odd to find a finishing school in the midst of academe. Shamefully, I had muddled the place with Lucie Clayton College, famed for teaching young gels to walk around with books on their heads, not in their hands. Lucy Cavendish, meanwhile, was founded by three female academics in 1965 to widen women’s access to higher education. The college has long encouraged applications from female undergraduates who have somehow missed the university boat – the brilliant author Elizabeth Speller was a nurse and housewife before reading Classics at Lucy. And the college’s ethos filters through to its Fiction Prize, which was established for women writers who haven’t been published.

I was reassured to find that some things hadn’t changed since I last adjudicated a prize: there are still many thrillers involving sinister cults who tattoo their members so they can be handily identified when they turn up murdered. And my golden rule of literature remains true: while in real life only 4 per cent of the population of Europe have red hair, in novels 75 per cent of heroines are flame-tressed, because this is apparently the best way to suggest a female character is spirited and idiosyncratic.

Nevertheless, when I met the finalists it was gratifying to find they all exemplified the college’s egalitarian and quirky spirit. There was a sweet-faced young Glaswegian, a poised Finnish-born translator, a north London poet and mum, an MPhil student and a fifty-something Bristol-based GP and mother of four. The Finn took top honours, but I predict glowing careers for all of them, because that tends to be the case with Lucy women.