The Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction: Every Winner and Every Shortlist
The Women’s Prize for Fiction had existed for twenty-eight years before anyone set up the same thing for non-fiction. The reason given was a number: by the Trust’s own count, 26.5 per cent of the non-fiction reviewed in British national newspapers was by women. Three prizes have been awarded since, and eighteen books have reached a shortlist. All eighteen are on this page, which is more than the prize’s own site puts in one place.
By Lisanne Swart · 3 winners and 18 shortlisted books, 2024 to 2026 · £30,000 and the Charlotte · Last reviewed 14 September 2026
The whole prize so far · 18 shortlisted books, 2024 to 2026
ClickTap a spine to jump to that book. The three winners come first, then each shortlist by year.
2026 winnerAnnounced 11 June 2026
2027 entries close5pm, 18 September 2026
2027 longlist10 February 2027
2027 shortlist7 April 2027
2027 winner17 June 2027
Entries for next year close this week. The non-fiction longlist always lands a month before the fiction one, so February is the next time this page has news. 1
Quick answer
The Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction has been awarded three times: to Naomi Klein in 2024, Rachel Clarke in 2025 and Lyse Doucet in 2026. It is open to narrative non-fiction in English by a woman of any nationality, published in the UK, and the winner gets £30,000 and an artwork called the Charlotte. Sixteen books are longlisted and six shortlisted each year, which is eighteen shortlisted books so far — and the five that did not win are usually the more interesting half of the list.
How this page chooses
It does not choose. The prize is three years old, so there is no long tail to sift and no need to pretend there is: every book that has ever reached a shortlist is here, all eighteen, with what it is about and where to get it.
The three winners get the longest entries because they are the ones people search for. The other fifteen get a paragraph each, and that is the part I would actually spend time on — a shortlist of six is a curated list already, made by five judges who read the whole longlist, and five of those six are always harder to find than the one that won. Where a book below has an author guide on this site, that link is mine and says so.
The three winners
Newest first. Three years, three books, and not much they have in common beyond being true.
01
ReportageWinner 2026
The Finest Hotel in Kabul: A People’s History of Afghanistan
Lyse Doucet · Hutchinson Heinemann, September 2025
Chaired by Thangam Debbonaire · Announced 11 June 2026 212
The Hotel Inter-Continental opened above Kabul in 1969 as proof that the country was modernising. Doucet tells fifty years of Afghan history through the people who kept it open: Hazrat, a housekeeper who stayed through the Soviet withdrawal, the civil war, the American invasion and the Taliban’s return; Abida, the first woman to cook there after 2001. The BBC’s chief international correspondent has been going to Afghanistan since 1988, and this is her first book.
Read it ifyou want a country explained through one building and the people who swept its floors.
Chaired by Kavita Puri · Announced 12 June 2025 11
Two nine-year-olds, two hundred miles apart. Keira Ball was left brain-dead after a car crash in Devon and her family chose to donate her organs. Max Johnson had been on the transplant list for 196 days in Manchester. Clarke, a palliative care doctor, follows both families through 2017 and builds the history of transplant surgery around them.
Read it ifyou can take a book about a child’s death that is, in the end, about what people do for strangers.
Chaired by Suzannah Lipscomb · Announced 13 June 2024 11
People kept mistaking Naomi Klein for Naomi Wolf, who had gone from feminist bestseller to the anti-vaccine circuit. Rather than correct them, Klein followed her double into what she calls the Mirror World and found a place where the same suspicion — that we are being lied to — leads two sets of people to opposite conclusions about who is lying.
Read it ifyou have watched someone you know disappear into the internet and want to understand where they went.
Lyse Doucet won, with The Finest Hotel in Kabul — it is number 01 above. These are the five it beat.
04
Memoir
Mother Mary Comes to Me
Arundhati Roy · Hamish Hamilton, 2025
Roy’s first memoir, and it is about her mother: Mary Roy, who founded a school, won a Supreme Court case that changed inheritance law for Syrian Christian women in India, and was impossible to live with.
Art Cure: The Science of How the Arts Transform Our Health
Daisy Fancourt · Cornerstone Press, 2025
Fancourt runs an epidemiology lab that measures what happens to people who sing, dance, paint or go to concerts. The finding is not that art is nice. It is that the effect shows up in the mortality data.
Artists, Siblings, Visionaries: The Lives and Loves of Gwen and Augustus John
Judith Mackrell · Picador, 2025
Two painters, brother and sister. He was famous in his lifetime and she was not; a century later it has swapped round. Mackrell writes them as one story rather than two.
One Paris hotel, and the refugees, spies, artists and stateless people who passed through its rooms before, during and after the war. The second book on this year’s shortlist to use a hotel as a way into a century.
Nation of Strangers: Rebuilding Home in the 21st Century
Ece Temelkuran · Canongate, 2025
Temelkuran left Turkey and has been writing from somewhere else ever since. This is about what displacement does to the ordinary bonds between people, and about how many of us now live somewhere we did not start.
Rachel Clarke won, with The Story of a Heart — it is number 02 above. These are the five it beat.
09
Memoir
A Thousand Threads
Neneh Cherry · Fern Press, 2024
Stockholm, a commune in rural Sweden, New York in the punk years, London. Cherry writes about her mother, her stepfather Don Cherry, and the decades of music in between as a life rather than a career.
A foreign policy adviser, stuck in the countryside during lockdown, finds a newborn leveret in a farm track. She keeps it alive. It keeps coming back. Neither of them is tame by the end.
Agent Zo: The Untold Story of Courageous WW2 Resistance Fighter Elżbieta Zawacka
Clare Mulley · Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2024
Zawacka was the only woman to parachute into occupied Poland as a trained Special Operations agent. She survived the war, and then the communist government imprisoned her for it.
What the Wild Sea Can Be: The Future of the World’s Ocean
Helen Scales · Grove Press, 2024
A marine biologist goes back through the ocean’s deep past to work out which of its possible futures are still available. Not a lament, which is rarer than it should be.
Four Chinese women born in the eighties and nineties: a factory worker, a teacher, an entrepreneur, an activist. Yang followed them for years and lets the country show up in what happens to them.
Naomi Klein won, with Doppelganger — it is number 03 above. These are the five it beat.
14
Memoir
How to Say Babylon: A Jamaican Memoir
Safiya Sinclair · 4th Estate, 2023
Sinclair grew up under a Rastafarian father who decided what she could read, wear and say. She wrote poems where he could not see them. This is the account of getting out, by a poet.
Thunderclap: A Memoir of Art and Life and Sudden Death
Laura Cumming · Chatto & Windus, 2023
In 1654 a gunpowder store blew up in Delft and killed the painter Carel Fabritius, who had taught Vermeer. Cumming braids his handful of surviving pictures with the life of her own father, also a painter.
All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake
Tiya Miles · Profile, 2021
A cotton sack, embroidered decades later with the story of what was put in it: a dress, three handfuls of pecans, a braid of hair, given by an enslaved mother to the nine-year-old daughter she was about to be separated from. Miles builds a family history out of almost no archive at all.
The people who make artificial intelligence work and are not in the marketing: data labellers in Nairobi, content moderators, the woman who found her face in a deepfake. Murgia is the Financial Times’s AI editor.
Masud walks flat landscapes — Orford Ness, the Cambridgeshire fens, the salt flats of Pakistan — because flatness is the only kind of place that does not ask anything of her. A book about landscape that is also about what a childhood can leave behind.
Why a second Women’s Prize, and what the Charlotte actually is
A prize built on three numbers, and a trophy that is not what most write-ups say it is.
The numbers the Trust published
When the Women’s Prize Trust announced the new award on 8 February 2023, it gave its reasons as figures rather than sentiment:
26.5% of the non-fiction reviewed in British national newspapers was by women, on the Trust’s own analysis.
33.7% of the non-fiction chosen for newspaper books-of-the-year lists in 2022 was by women.
35.5% of the winners of seven British non-fiction prizes over ten years were women.
The fiction prize had been running since 1996 on a similar argument. Non-fiction had nothing equivalent, and the first award went out in June 2024. 6
What the winner gets, and why “statuette” is wrong
£30,000 and a limited-edition artwork called the Charlotte, both given by the Charlotte Aitken Trust. Plenty of write-ups call it a statuette, which is the word the 2023 press release used before the thing existed. It is not a figure of anybody: it is an abstract bronze by the sculptor Ann Christopher RA, chosen through a competition run with the Royal Society of Sculptors, with a rusty-red patina and surfaces meant to suggest rock strata and early tools. It is cast again for every winner. 8
It is named for Charlotte Aitken, the only child of the literary agent Gillon Aitken. She worked at her father’s agency and read across everything; she died in 2011, aged twenty-seven. He set up the trust in her name, and it funds this prize money along with several other awards for writers. 9
Who is allowed to enter
Any narrative non-fiction in English by a woman of any nationality, first published in the UK inside the eligibility year, and submitted by an established British publisher. Authors cannot enter themselves, and most imprints get one or two submissions a year, so a publisher is choosing before a judge ever does. Judges can also call in a book nobody submitted.
Out: translations, co-authored books, ghostwritten books, self-published books, anything containing AI-generated text, anything under 30,000 words, and academic and children’s books. That is a narrower gate than the fiction prize, and it is why some obvious names never appear. 7
Sixteen, six, one
The rules say the longlist shall be “no more nor fewer than sixteen” and the shortlist “no more nor fewer than six”. Seven of the sixteen longlisted in 2026 were first books. So across three years: forty-eight longlisted, eighteen shortlisted, three winners — and the eighteen are all on this page. 7
Who pays for it
Findmypast came in as inaugural sponsor in June 2023 for an initial three years, covering 2024, 2025 and 2026, and also funds an outreach programme for new non-fiction writers. The prize money comes from the Charlotte Aitken Trust, committed for the same three years. Nothing has been announced about who funds it from 2027, which is worth knowing before you assume this prize is permanent. 10
Frequently asked questions about the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction
Who won the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction in 2026?
Lyse Doucet, for The Finest Hotel in Kabul: A People’s History of Afghanistan, announced on 11 June 2026. It is the first book by the BBC’s chief international correspondent, and it tells the history of Afghanistan through the Hotel Inter-Continental Kabul and the people who worked there. The chair of judges, Thangam Debbonaire, called it a perfect work of narrative non-fiction.
Who has won the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction?
Three writers, because the prize is three years old. Naomi Klein won the first one in 2024 for Doppelganger, Rachel Clarke won in 2025 for The Story of a Heart, and Lyse Doucet won in 2026 for The Finest Hotel in Kabul. Eighteen books have been shortlisted across those three years, and all eighteen are on this page.
Why is there a separate Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction?
Because of a gap the Women’s Prize Trust measured before it launched the prize in 2023. By its own analysis, 26.5 per cent of non-fiction reviews in national newspapers went to books by women; 33.7 per cent of the non-fiction chosen for newspaper books-of-the-year lists in 2022 was by women; and across seven British non-fiction prizes over ten years, 35.5 per cent of the winners were women. The fiction prize had existed since 1996 and non-fiction had nothing equivalent.
What does the winner get?
30,000 pounds and a limited-edition artwork called the Charlotte, both given by the Charlotte Aitken Trust. The Charlotte is not a figure of a person: it is an abstract bronze by the sculptor Ann Christopher, with a rusty-red patina and surfaces meant to suggest rock strata and early tools, and it is cast again for each winner. It is named after Charlotte Aitken, the daughter of the literary agent Gillon Aitken, who died in 2011 at twenty-seven.
Who can enter the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction?
Any narrative non-fiction book written in English by a woman of any nationality, first published in the United Kingdom within the eligibility year, and submitted by an established UK publisher. Authors cannot enter their own books. Translations, co-authored books, ghostwritten books, self-published books, books containing AI-generated text and anything under 30,000 words are all excluded, and so are academic and children’s books.
How many books are longlisted and shortlisted?
Sixteen on the longlist and six on the shortlist, every year, and the rules say no more and no fewer. Of the sixteen longlisted in 2026, seven were first books.
When is the 2027 Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction announced?
Submissions close at 5pm on 18 September 2026. The longlist is announced on 10 February 2027, the shortlist on 7 April 2027, and the winner on 17 June 2027 at Bedford Square Gardens in London, at the same ceremony as the fiction prize.
What is the difference between the Women’s Prize for Fiction and the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction?
They are run by the same charity and share one ceremony, and both are worth 30,000 pounds, but they are separate awards with separate judges. The fiction prize started in 1996 and its trophy is a statuette called the Bessie, by Grizel Niven. The non-fiction prize started in 2024 and its trophy is the Charlotte. The non-fiction longlist also comes a month earlier than the fiction longlist every year.
Who sponsors the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction?
Findmypast was the inaugural sponsor, announced in June 2023 for an initial three-year term covering 2024, 2025 and 2026, and it also funds an outreach programme for new non-fiction writers. The prize money itself comes from the Charlotte Aitken Trust, also committed for three years. Nothing has been announced yet about who funds the prize from 2027.
Facts last checked 14 September 2026. All three shortlists were taken from the prize’s own announcements and cross-checked against Wikipedia; they agree. Two things to know about the sources. The 26.5% review figure is credited only to the Trust’s own analysis and carries no year, so it cannot be checked independently. And subtitles differ between the UK and US editions of several of these books — the ones here are the UK versions the prize itself used. Publishers and dates are for the first UK edition.
This list was not put together by a machine. The notes are all mine, and the books are all theirs.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. See more on her personal bookshelf.
“26.5 per cent of the non-fiction reviewed in the papers was by women.”
— The reason this prize exists.
Eighteen books in three years is a shelf you could actually finish. The newsletter goes out once a month with rather less than that, and only what is worth the time.
To provide the best experiences, we use technologies like cookies to store and/or access device information. Consenting to these technologies will allow us to process data such as browsing behavior or unique IDs on this site. Not consenting or withdrawing consent, may adversely affect certain features and functions.
Functional Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes.The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
