Neneh Cherry and Anne Applebaum longlisted for Women’s prize for nonfiction

The Buffalo Stance singer Neneh Cherry, historian Anne Applebaum and Labour MP Yuan Yang are among those longlisted for the Women’s prize for nonfiction.

16 authors, 11 of whom are British, are in contention for this year’s £30,000 prize, which was launched last year to redress the gender imbalance in nonfiction prizes in the UK.

The longlisted titles “boast so many different disciplines and genres”, said journalist Kavita Puri, who is this year’s judging chair. “What unites them all is the quality of the writing, the authority of the voice and the originality of their storytelling, and just the depth and incisiveness of the research.”

Cherry was longlisted for her memoir A Thousand Threads, while Yang was chosen for Private Revolutions, her portrait of modern China told through the lives of four young women. Applebaum appears on the list for Autocracy, Inc., which explores the kleptocratic financial structures that underlie autocracies.

While the selected books are “all quite different”, said Puri, themes that emerged were “power and control – how it’s used, how it’s abused”, injustice, human connections “with each other, but also the natural world” and climate change.

There are also books featuring “perspectives that have been overlooked”, said Puri, including Indigenous voices, such as By the Fire We Carry by Native American activist Rebecca Nagle which looks at the “battles of the Muscogee people”, while Tracker by Australian writer Alexis Wright is a “very personal” story of an Indigenous Australian leader.

Other “striking personal stories” include Ootlin by Jenni Fagan, about her experience growing up in care, and The Story of a Heart by Rachel Clarke, “an exquisite story about one family giving the heart of their child, so that another can live, and the wonder of science and medicine”.

The shortlist of six books will be announced on 26 March, with the winner revealed on 12 June, alongside the winner of the fiction prize, which turns 30 this year.

Also on the longlist are What the Wild Sea Can Be by Helen Scales, Wild Thing by Sue Prideaux, Embers of the Hands by Eleanor Barraclough, The Eagle and the Hart by Helen Castor, Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton, Why Fish Don’t Exist by Lulu Miller, Agent Zo by Clare Mulley, The Peepshow by Kate Summerscale and Sister in Law by Harriet Wistrich.

The nonfiction prize was announced in 2023 following research which found that only 35.5% of books awarded a nonfiction prize over the prior decade were written by women, across seven UK nonfiction prizes.

Given that “female writers in the nonfiction area don’t do as well” as their male counterparts in terms of book advances and newspaper coverage, Puri sees this prize as an opportunity to “elevate brilliant female writing in a whole array of genres”. Women’s perspectives on the “most pressing” issues of the day “need to be heard”, she added. “So there is a huge need for this prize today”.

This year’s prize was open to books published in the UK between 1 April 2024 and 31 March 2025. Alongside Puri on the judging panel are the writers Leah Broad, Elizabeth Buchan, Elizabeth-Jane Burnett and Emma Gannon.

The inaugural nonfiction prize was won by Naomi Klein for her book Doppelganger.