Women's Prize for Non-Fiction
The 2025 Judges
‘It’s an enormous privilege to chair the second year of the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction, to celebrate outstanding female writers who are creating original work, across a broad range of genres, from history to science and nature, and beyond. Along with my fellow judges, I look forward to seeing how they are responding – in their own fields – to some of the biggest questions of our time, and elevating their exceptional voices.’ – Kavita Puri
A panel of five women – all passionate readers and at the top of their respective professions – choose the winner of the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction.
The 2025 Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction is chaired by journalist, author and broadcaster Kavita Puri. Joining Kavita is writer and broadcaster, Dr Leah Broad, whose work focuses on women’s cultural history; novelist and critic, Elizabeth Buchan; writer and environmental academic Dr Elizabeth-Jane Burnett; and author and writer of The Hyphen newsletter on Substack, Emma Gannon.
Kavita Puri is a multi-award-winning journalist, executive producer and author. She is the creator, writer and presenter of several audio series for the BBC including Three Million on BBC Sounds which won best New Podcast at the British Podcast Awards 2024, as well as Radio 4’s Three Pounds in My Pocket and Partition Voices. Her book Partition Voices: Untold British Stories was adapted at the Donmar Warehouse and went on tour this year. She was the Editor of the BBC foreign documentary programme Our World, and worked for many years on Newsnight.
Dr Leah Broad is an award-winning writer and historian, whose work focuses on twentieth century cultural history, particularly women in music. Her first book was the critically-acclaimed Quartet: How Four Women Challenged the Musical World, a group biography of four women composers. She holds a DPhil from the University of Oxford and her writing has appeared extensively in national publications, as well as in the programme notes for major classical music events. She is a frequent public speaker and contributor to BBC radio, discussing topics from Nordic music to women composers.
Elizabeth Buchan is a novelist whose books include the award-winning Consider the Lily and the international bestsellers Revenge of the Middle-Aged Women and Bonjour, Sophie. Her short stories have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and published in many magazines. She began her career as a blurb writer at Penguin Books and moved on to become a fiction editor at Random House before leaving to write full-time. Elizabeth has been a judge for the Whitbread First Novel Award and for the Costa Novel Award, is a patron of the Guildford Book Festival and a co-founder of the Clapham Book Festival. The paperback of Bonjour, Sophie will be published on 3 April 2025.
Dr Elizabeth-Jane Burnett is a writer and academic whose work has a largely environmental focus. Publications include the nature writing books Twelve Words for Moss – shortlisted for the Wainwright and Jhalak prizes – and The Grassling, A Geological Memoir; poetry collections Of Sea and Swims, and literary critical monograph A Social Biography of Contemporary Innovative Poetry Communities: The Gift, the Wager and Poethics. She was a Leverhulme Research Fellow for Creative Writing and Climate Change: Developing a New Wetlands Literature, and her debut novel is forthcoming with Penguin.
Emma Gannon is a Sunday Times bestselling author and creator of the popular Substack newsletter The Hyphen. She has written columns on work, wellbeing and creativity, and published six bestselling books. Her debut novel Olive was longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award in 2022. For six years she hosted the WEBBY-nominated careers podcast Ctrl, Alt, Delete, which has had over 13 million downloads to date. Alongside writing, she is a teacher on the online learning platform Skillshare and hosts creativity retreats in the UK and all over the world. In 2018, she was in the Forbes 30 Under 30 List in Media. Her new novel will be published in April 2025.
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