Last year's Orange Prize was particularly eventful: Before the ceremony, shortlisted author Zadie Smith gave an interview in the Mail on Sunday in which she appeared to criticize the choice of people on the jury and the prize itself. Then the winner, Linda Grant, was accused of plagiarism. This year, however, the controversy has been deliberately orchestrated. Addressing another source of complaint -- the all-female jury that picks the long list, shortlist and winner -- the Orange Prize committee devised an amusing and instructive plan: two separate jury panels, one made up of men, the other of women, each rendering its own verdict.

But as Clare Alexander, literary agent and former publisher and a member of the selection committee, was keen to point out, the two juries did not have equal weight. "Since the beginning of the prize," she told me, "we have always had pressure to have males on the jury. And the decision to have a separate male jury answered that criticism while ensuring that it was still a female jury that selected the shortlist."

Indeed, the male jury (novelist Paul Bailey, writer and journalist John Walsh and the managing director of Ottakar's bookshop, Paul Henderson) had no real power at all. The female jury (journalist Kate Adie, musician Suzanne Vega, managing director of Amazon.co.uk Rachel Holmes, novelist Emily Perkins and former newspaper editor Rosie Boycott) decided on the long list, the shortlist and the eventual winner. "They made sure we had no effect on the final choice of winner," Walsh points out. "They told us our deliberations wouldn't count for anything or influence the all-girl jury in any way. And they provided us with a long list already selected by the women jury rather than chosen by the men. It was like sitting down to review a meal where the choice of dishes was made by the restaurant, and you were invited only to say how much you liked things."

Novelist Perkins claims that she had no interest in the men's choices. "It never crossed my mind to be interested in what the men were coming up with. Right from the beginning the female jury was the only thing I thought was important."

The male jury seems mainly to have been conceived as a springboard for an intellectual discussion on the differences between male and female perceptions of literature. It's succeeded in that perhaps too well for those convinced that men and women have different standards for literary achievement. The winning book, "The Idea of Perfection" by Kate Grenville, was the only one to appear on both juries' shortlists.

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"