The Women’s Prize’s new book prize, which is given to nonfiction publications, will be given each year. It is available to all female writers who write in English and are published in the United Kingdom, no matter where they are from in the world. The winner will get £30,000 in prize money and a figurine called “The Charlotte.” The Charlotte Aitken Trust, a nonprofit organization founded by the late Gillon Aitken on behalf of his late daughter, has donated the statuette.
The Women’s Prize’s originator and director, Kate Mosse, claimed that the award’s goal was to incorporate women rather than detract from outstanding male writers. She continued by expressing her wish that it would draw attention to everyone who is doing something extraordinary, allowing readers to make their own decisions.
“In nonfiction, the idea of a neutral voice—and, to a greater extent, the idea of the expert—is prevalent. But the expert, the default voice, is actually male, despite the fact that a ton of amazing narrative non-fiction is being produced by women and is utterly going unnoticed. Readers are missing out, so it matters, said Mosse. The Women’s Prize Trust is actively looking for sponsorship with the goal of launching the new prize in 2024.
According to the trust’s research, female non-fiction authors received 26.5% of the non-fiction reviews in national newspapers, and 35.5% of non-fiction books that won prizes in the preceding decade were written by female authors across seven UK non-fiction prizes.
The Baillie Gifford Prize, formerly the Samuel Johnson Prize, is one of the most well-known awards in UK non-fiction. Katherine Rundell received the honor in 2022 for her publication Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne. Since the award’s establishment in 1999, 16 more males than women have taken home the prize.
The Wolfson History Prize, the James Cropper Wainwright Prize for Nature and Conservation Writing, the Orwell Prize for Political Writing, and the Costa Biography Award, which was discontinued along with the other Costa Book Award in 2022, are only a few further non-fiction awards.
Mosse claimed that she was not startled by the reviews and prize numbers since she had a gut feeling that women were underrepresented in fiction reviewing. The research, she continued, was “grim reading.”
Mosse claims that a variety of causes contributed to the establishment of the non-fiction prize. This included the Women’s Prize Trust becoming a nonprofit organization in 2018. The trust’s goals and a newspaper article from the summer of 2022 listing literature the future prime minister should read but leaving out all works by female authors served as Mosse’s catalysts.
The new Women’s Nonfiction Prize is supported by writers like Kate Williams, Afua Hirsch, Anita Anand, Hallie Rubenhold, Mary Ann Sieghart, and Charlotte Atiken Trust.
All non-fiction categories, from history to memoir, music to nature, writing to science, and philosophy to biography, will be eligible for the award. Like the Women’s Prize for fiction, the winner will be chosen by a panel of five judges.
In reaction to the dearth of female writers on the shortlists of prestigious awards, the Women’s Prize for Fiction was established in 1996. Ruth Ozeki won the prize for her work, The Book of Form and Emptiness, in 2022.
