New literary prize aims to lift profile of women in nonfiction
— Books about the dizzying impact of the internet and artificial intelligence are among finalists for a new book prize that aims to help fix the gender imbalance in nonfiction publishing.
The shortlisted six books for the inaugural Women’s Prize for Nonfiction, announced on Wednesday, include Canadian author-activist Naomi Klein’s Doppleganger, a plunge into online misinformation, and British journalist Madhumita Murgia’s Code-Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI.
The 30,000 pound ($51,000 Cdn) award is a sister to the 29-year-old Women’s Prize for Fiction and is open to female English-language writers from any country in any nonfiction genre.
The finalists also include autobiographical works — poet Safiya Sinclair’s How to Say Babylon: A Jamaican Memoir and British art critic Laura Cumming’s Thunderclap: A Memoir of Art and Life and Sudden Death.
Rounding out the list are British author Noreen Masud’s travelogue-memoir A Flat Place, and Harvard history professor Tiya Miles’ All That She Carried, a history of American enslavement told through one Black family’s keepsake.
British historian Suzannah Lipscomb, who is chairing the judging panel, said that “the readers of these books will never see the world — be it through art, history, landscape, politics, religion or technology — the same again.”
The winners of both nonfiction and fiction prizes will be announced at a ceremony in London on June 13.
The prize was set up in response to a gender imbalance in the book world, where men buy more nonfiction than women — and write more prize-wining nonfiction books.
The company Nielsen Book Research found in 2019 that while women bought 59% of all the books sold in the United Kingdom, men accounted for just over half of adult nonfiction purchases.
Prize organizers say that in 2022, only 26.5% of nonfiction books reviewed in Britain’s newspapers were by women, and male writers dominated established nonfiction writing prizes.