“Write what you want to write,” that was the simple but powerful advice from the French author Annie Ernaux, the Nobel Laureate in Literature in 2022.

I thought of her words this week when considering the life and work of Sophie Kinsella; the beloved author most famous for her Confessions of a Shopaholic series, who has died, aged 55, from an aggressive form of brain cancer. Often hailed as the queen of “chick lit”, she understandably disliked the label. If you’d sold more than 50 million books in more than 60 countries, you might also baulk at a descriptor that sounds like a weird porn genre.

As her friend and fellow bestselling author Jenny Colgan said to me on the Radio 4 Today programme this week, when remembering her pal: “If you used the phrase “chick lit” while working in an office, you’d get hauled up in front of HR.” You could believe it, in this day and age.

Instead, Sophie apparently preferred calling her work “wit lit” or “romantic comedies”. Just as the likes of Richard Curtis gets to (a similarly successful British creative export).

Her early death and the public outpouring of grief and love prompted me to think about her legacy and how we nearly didn’t have the joy of her voice. It reminds me just how pernicious the downgrading of women’s creative work really is – and the very real harm of seemingly innocent and tabloid-esque labels such as “chick lit”.

Consider this: even

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