The Women’s Prize Trust have launched an annual award that will reward women’s non-fiction writing.
The award was set up after research found that women were less likely to be reviewed or win prizes when compared to their male counterparts.
The prize, which the trust hopes to award for the first time in 2024, will run alongside their long-running fiction prize, and will be open to all female writers who write in English, and are published in the UK. The Women’s Prize Trust is currently searching for sponsorship for this award.
The prize will include all narrative non-fiction, from history to memoir, science, philosophy, biography, music, and nature writing. There will be a panel of five judges who make the decision.
The winner will receive £30,000 and a statuette named ‘the Charlotte’, gifted by the Charlotte Aitken Trust, which was established by former literary agent Gillon Aitken following her sudden death in 2011.
Founder director of the Women’s prize for fiction, Kate Mosse, said that the prize was ‘not about taking the spotlight away from the brilliant male writers, it’s about adding the women in’.
Mosse went on to say that the ‘default voice is male’, and that there is a ‘huge amount of amazing narrative non-fiction being written by women that is simply not getting any attention at all. It matters because readers are missing out’.
The trust found through research that 35.% of books given a non-fiction prize over the past 10 years were written by a female writer, across seven UK non-fiction prizes, and that 26.5% of non-fiction reviews in national newspapers were assigned to books by female writers.
Mosse added that the statistics did not surprise her, stating that the research made ‘grim reading’. Mosse said that a number of factors led to the launch of the prize, including the establishment of the Women’s Prize Trust as a charity in 2018.
The prize is being supported by authors including Anita Anand, Hallie Rubenhold, Mary Ann Sieghart, Kate Williams, and Afua Hirsch.
Words by Tabitha Wilson
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