Women’s Prize for Nonfiction 2026 shortlist announced

In the UK, the shortlist for the 2026 Women’s Prize for Nonfiction, worth  £30,000 (A$57,702) has been announced.

The six shortlisted titles are:

• The Finest Hotel in Kabul: A People’s History of Afghanistan (Lyse Doucet, Hutchinson Heinemann)
• Art Cure: The Science of How the Arts Transform Our Health (Daisy Fancourt, Cornerstone)
• Artists, Siblings, Visionaries: The Lives and Loves of Gwen and Augustus John (Judith Mackrell, Picador)
• Hotel Exile: Paris in the Shadow of War (Jane Rogoyska, Allen Lane)
• Mother Mary Comes to Me (Arundhati Roy, Hamish Hamilton)
• Nation of Strangers: Rebuilding Home in the 21st Century by Ece Temelkuran, Canongate).

The Women’s Prize for Nonfiction is an annual book prize that “celebrates exceptional narrative nonfiction by women” and is “open to all women writers from across the globe who are published in the UK and writing in English”.

Announcing the shortlist, the prize organisers shared data commissioned by the Women’s Prize Trust. The data showed that while women writers of nonfiction are starting to gain some market share (according to from Nielsen BookScan UK data) in genres such as Popular Science (22% in 2025, up from 11% in 2023) and Philosophy (10% in 2025, up from 5% in 2023), “male writers continue to dominate most nonfiction disciplines”.

“This is particularly true of Business & Management (93%), Sport (90%), and Politics & Current Affairs (82%),” said the prize announcement, which also shared data that found “women are significantly more likely to purchase titles written by women (75%) than men (25%)”.

UK author Rachel Clarke won last year’s prize for The Story of a Heart (Abacus).

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