In its inaugural year, the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction provides a platform for non-fiction written by women that has been previously overlooked and underestimated.
We are bursting with excitement as we introduce to you the inaugural 2024 Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction longlist.
From gripping memoirs and polemic narratives, to groundbreaking investigative journalism and revisionist history, these 16 titles will change the way you view the non-fiction section of the bookshop.
Whether you are a seasoned non-fiction reader or considering trying for the first time, with this list you have at your fingertips a breadth of titles that reflects the quality and ambition of non-fiction writing by women around the globe that spark curiosity and might just change the world.
Reading for the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction has been a revelation and a joy. I am very proud to introduce the sensational books that make up the inaugural Longlist. Buy them, borrow them, above all read them, and in so doing you’ll be elevating women’s voices and female perspectives in a whole range of disciplines and on a whole host of topics.
Professor Susannah Lipscomb, chair of judges, broadcaster and writer
The list features seven debut writers, two international bestsellers, two poets and five journalists. So, are you ready to meet our sister prize, its incredible longlisted titles and the brilliant writers behind them?
The full list in alphabetical order by author surname is:
- The Britannias: An Island Quest by Alice Albinia, published by Allen Lane
- Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts and the Death of Freedom by Grace Blakeley, published by Bloomsbury
- Eve: How The Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution by Cat Bohannon, published by Hutchinson Heinemann
- Intervals published by Marianne Brooker published by Fitzcarraldo Editions
- Shadows at Noon: The South Asian Twentieth Century by Joya Chatterji published by Bodley Head
- Thunderclap: A Memoir of Art and Life and Sudden Death by Laura Cumming, published by Chatto & Windus
- Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in the Philippines by Patricia Evangelista, published by Grove Press
- Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life by Anna Funder, published by Viking
- Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth and Motherhood by Lucy Jones, published by Allen Lane
- Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein, published by Allen Lane
- A Flat Place by Noreen Masud, published by Hamish Hamilton
- All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake by Tiya Miles, published by Profile
- Code-Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI by Madhumita Murgia, published by Picador
- The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes who Created the Oxford English Dictionary by Sarah Ogilvie, published by Chatto & Windus
- Young Queens: The Intertwined Lives of Catherine de’ Medici, Elisabeth de Valois and Mary, Queen of Scots by Leah Redmond Chang, published by Bloomsbury Circus
- How to Say Babylon: A Jamaican Memoir by Safiya Sinclair, published by 4th Estate
