Every March, with the announcement of the longlist for the prize for fiction written by a woman, comes a flurry of “Is this still relevant/necessary/interesting?” features. But the novelist Tim Lott, 52, raised the issue this weekend with re-energised spleen in an article headlined “The Orange Prize is a sexist con-trick”. He wrote: “Women are predominant, in terms of number and power, in most of the major publishing houses and agencies. They sell most of the books, into a market that largely comprises female readers...Girls in schools are more literate than boys, and pupils are taught reading mainly by female teachers promoting mainly female writers. ” The social conditions that supposedly justify the prize no longer exist, he said, concluding that it “should be shunned - or, at the very least, mocked mercilessly”.

This is not new ground. Lott revelled in the gender controversy of his 2003 novel, The Love Secrets of Don Juan, in which the middle-aged male protagonist, scarred by divorce, compiles a series of “love secrets” - or, as he more accurately describes it, “One Hundred Nightmare Things About Women”. At the time Lott defended his desire to knock the ball back into the women's court: “Men are humans, too. Sometimes I feel that men are like Fifties housewives. They are seen as stereotypes, they are objectified ... we don't have to go around walking on eggshells any more.” That book was born of Lott's divorce from Sarina Lavigna, a college lecturer. Lott and Lavigna had two daughters together, and Lott found the break-up cripplingly painful, exorcising his demons in an account, published in Granta, in which he quoted himself saying: “I f***ing hate you. You f***ing c***.”

He recently remarried and, with two new daughters, is apparently in high spirits. But the road to domestic bliss has been rocky. Having grown up a greengrocer's son in Southall, Middlesex, and attended a grammar school, he became a pop journalist and magazine publisher. In 1986 he enrolled as a mature student (politics and history) at the London School of Economics, an experience that left him confused and unhappy, eventually triggering a breakdown in which he found himself “standing on the top of a high building willing to launch my existence into oblivion”. Soon after his recovery, his mother, a school dinner lady, killed herself.

These two events pushed Lott into writing, and the memoir of his depression, The Scent of Dried Roses, was critically acclaimed on publication in 1996. Since then he has written Hornbyesque lad-lit (White City Blue), Thatcher-era social realism (Rumours of a Hurricane) and surveillance-society satire (The Seymour Tapes). His most recent book, Fearless, a powerful, sparely written moral fable for children, is the first with a female protagonist. Clearly Lott believes women should be heard - as long as they don't drown out the men.

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