The Women’s Prize for Fiction has announced its intention to launch a new category for non-fiction. The wildly successful award has been running for almost 30 years, with recipients including authors such as Madeline Miller, Zadie Smith, Maggie O’Farrell and, most recently, Ruth Ozeki in 2022.
Like the Women’s Prize for fiction, it will be open to all women around the world who are published in the United Kingdom and write in English. All categories of narrative non-fiction will be considered – from philosophy to music to memoir. It will be decided by a panel of five judges.
They are seeking sponsorship to aid their plans to launch later this year and hold the first awards in 2024. For the first three years, the prize will be £30,000 and a statuette called ‘The Charlotte’ from the Charlotte Aitken Trust. The Women’s Prize Trust is seeking additional funding for the prize money beyond this three-year period and to pay the administrative costs associated with running the competition.
The inspiration for the Women’s Prize for fiction came in 1991 when none of the six shortlisted books for the Man Booker prize that year had been written by women. Similarly, the idea for the launch of this non-fiction prize came after a newspaper article from the summer of 2022 titled “Books the next prime minister should read”. This list did not feature one woman. Kate Mosse, the founder of the Women’s prize, described this as a “trigger moment”, which convinced her to launch a prize for non-fiction. She also cited a “significant rolling back of women’s rights over the past five years”. The establishment of the Women’s Prize Trust as a registered charity in the UK was also instrumental in helping them come to this decision as they analysed their goals and values more deeply. They found in their research that female non-fiction authors were less likely to have their books reviewed in national media and to be shortlisted or win prizes.
This prize aims to empower female authors around the globe and help reduce the gender gap in the non-fiction industry. You can keep updated with the progress of the awards and the nominees at: https://www.womensprizeforfiction.co.uk/features/news.
