The Women’s Prize Trust revealed the longlist for the 2025 Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction, the annual award that “celebrates exceptional narrative non-fiction by women.”
Anne Applebaum, who won a Pulitzer Prize for her 2003 book, Gulag, made the longlist for Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want To Run the World. Neneh Cherry, the musician known for her 1988 hit single, “Buffalo Stance,” was nominated for her memoir, A Thousand Threads, alongside Sue Prideaux for Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin, Eleanor Barraclough for Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age, and Helen Castor for The Eagle and the Hart: The Tragedy of Richard II and Henry IV.
Rebecca Nagle was longlisted for By the Fire We Carry: The Generations-Long Fight for Justice on Native Land; the book is also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize. Rachel Clarke was nominated for The Story of a Heart: Two Families, One Heart, and the Medical Miracle that Saved a Child's Life, as were Chloe Dalton for Raising Hare, Jenni Fagan for Ootlin, Lulu Miller for Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life, and Clare Mulley for Agent Zo: The Untold Story of a Fearless World War II Resistance Fighter.
Also making the longlist were Helen Scales for What the Wild Sea Can Be: The Future of the World’s Ocean, Kate Summerscale for The Peepshow: The Murders at 10 Rillington Place, Harriet Wistrich for Sister in Law: Fighting for Justice in a System Designed by Men, Alexis Wright for Tracker, and Yuan Yang for Private Revolutions: Four Women Face China’s New Social Order.
The Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction was first awarded last year, to Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World. The shortlist for this year’s prize will be announced on March 26, with the winner revealed at a ceremony in London on June 12.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
