Funder longlisted for inaugural Women’s Prize for Nonfiction

Anna Funder is longlisted for the inaugural Women’s Prize for Nonfiction, worth £30,000 (A$58,000), for her book Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s invisible life (Hamish Hamilton).

The fifteen other titles longlisted for the award are:

• The Britannias: An island quest (Alice Albinia, Allen Lane)
• Vulture Capitalism: Corporate crimes, backdoor bailouts and the death of freedom (Grace Blakeley, Bloomsbury)
• Eve: How the female body drove 200 million years of human evolution (Cat Bohannon, Hutchinson Heinemann)
• Intervals (Marianne Brooker, Fitzcarraldo Editions)
• Shadows at Noon: The South Asian twentieth century (Joya Chatterji, Bodley Head)
• Thunderclap: A memoir of art and life and sudden death (Laura Cumming, Chatto & Windus)
• Some People Need Killing: A memoir of murder in the Philippines (Patricia Evangelista, Grove Press)
• Matrescence: On the metamorphosis of pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood (Lucy Jones, Allen Lane)
• Doppelganger: A trip into the mirror world (Naomi Klein, Allen Lane)
• A Flat Place (Noreen Masud, Hamish Hamilton)
• All That She Carried: The journey of Ashley’s sack, a Black family keepsake (Tiya Miles, Profile)
• Code-Dependent: Living in the shadow of AI (Madhumita Murgia, Picador)
• The Dictionary People: The unsung heroes who created the Oxford English Dictionary (Sarah Ogilvie, Chatto & Windus)
• Young Queens: The intertwined lives of Catherine de’ Medici, Elisabeth de Valois and Mary, Queen of Scots (Leah Redmond Chang, Bloomsbury)
• How to Say Babylon: A Jamaican memoir (Safiya Sinclair, Fourth Estate).

The longlist ranges from ‘gripping memoirs and polemic narratives, to groundbreaking investigative journalism and revisionist history’. Chair of judges Suzannah Lipscomb told the Bookseller the prize had been partly prompted by research that showed nonfiction books by women were given less review space, were less likely to be recognised by prizes, and attracted smaller advances.

‘I think for some, nonfiction is still perceived [as a] man’s game, and that fewer women have been recognised for their contribution to nonfiction,’ Lipscomb said. ‘So this prize is about starting to change this and about bringing attention to excellent, rigorous books by women that are really well written and saying women can still write with authority.’

The Women’s Prize for Nonfiction celebrates excellence, originality, rigorous research and accessibility in narrative nonfiction. A shortlist of six will be announced on 27 March, with the winner to be awarded at an event in London on 13 June. More information is available on the prize’s website.

Category: Awards Local news