Multiple themes are explored in non-fiction prize shortlisted work
Books/reading
Artificial intelligence, online politics, and enslavement are among the themes explored in the six books shortlisted for the inaugural Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction.
The new sister award to the Women’s Prize for Fiction, now in its 29th year, aims to celebrate “excellence, originality and accessibility” in narrative non-fiction.
Journalist and art critic Laura Cumming has been nominated for her book Thunderclap: A Memoir Of Art And Life And Sudden Death, which explores the relationship between art and life while reflecting on her story and that of her late Scottish painter father, and the great artists of the Dutch Golden Age.
Noreen Masud, an English lecturer at Bristol University, has been shortlisted for her memoir A Flat Place.
The book, which is her first written for a non-academic readership, follows her journey across Britain’s flatlands, from Orford Ness to Orkney.
Madhumita Murgia, who is the first artificial intelligence (AI) editor of the Financial Times, has been nominated for Code Dependent: Living In The Shadow Of AI. Her work delves into the complexities of AI and automated decision-making.
Award-winning author Naomi Klein’s shortlisted work, Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World, charts her exploration of the online world of “conspiracy theories, anti-vaxxers and demagogue hucksters”. Harvard historian Tiya
Miles’ has been shortlisted for her book All That She Carried: The Journey Of Ashley’s Sack, A Black Family Keepsake. It tells the story of an embroidered sack that originally belonged to an enslaved woman.
Rounding off the shortlist is poet Safiya Sinclair, who has been selected for her memoir about her childhood in Jamaica, titled How To Say Babylon.
The chairwoman of the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction judges, Professor Suzannah Lipscomb, said: “The readers of these books will never see the world – be it through art, history, landscape, politics, religion or technology – the same again.”
The winner will be crowned at the Women’s Prize Trust’s summer party in central London on Thursday June 13.
The readers of these books will never see the world – be it through art, history, landscape, politics, religion or technology – the same again – judge
Suzannah
Lipscomb