Thoughts on the Women's Prize for Non Fiction Longlist 2025

 

With the way the world is going right now haunting news sites early in the morning doesn't seem to be the best way to start the day, however on Weds 12th I was doing just that as I waited for the Women's Prize to announce their non fiction longlist.

As my reading round-up showed - last year 42% of my reads were non fiction.  I've looked at this list more closely I can say that 51% of these books were written by women so it was inevitable that I'd be waiting for this announcement quite closely.

There are 16 books on the long list and of these I've read just three - which shows that I probably missed a lot of good books in 2024! The ones I have read are in purple below.

Anne Applebaum – Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World – Allen Lane (PRH)

Eleanor Barraclough – Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age – (Profile Books)

Helen Castor – The Eagle and the Hart: The Tragedy of Richard II and Henry IV – Allen Lane (PRH)

Neneh Cherry – A Thousand Threads  (Fern Press (PRH))

Rachel Clarke – The Story of a Heart – (Abacus (Hachette))

Chloe Dalton – Raising Hare  (Canongate Books)

Jenni Fagan – Ootlin  (Hutchinson Heinemann, Century, (PRH))

Lulu Miller – Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love and the Hidden Order of Life  (ONE, Pushkin Press)

Clare Mulley – Agent Zo: The Untold Stories of Fearless WW2 Resistance Fighter Elżbieta Zawacka  (Weidenfeld & Nicolson (Hachette))

Rebecca Nagle – By the Fire We Carry: The Generations-Long Fight for Justice on Native Land  (William Collins (HarperCollins))

Sue Prideaux – Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin (Faber )

Helen Scales – What the Wild Sea Can Be: The Future of the World’s Ocean (Grove Press, Atlantic Books) 

Kate Summerscale – The Peepshow: The Murders at 10 Rillington Place  (Bloomsbury Circus (Bloomsbury))

Harriet Wistrich – Sister in Law: Fighting for Justice in a System Designed by Men  (Torva, Transworld, (PRH))

Alexis Wright – Tracker  (And Other Stories)

Yuan Yang – Private Revolutions: Coming of Age in a New China (Bloomsbury Circus (Bloomsbury))


Part of the reason why I have read so many non fiction books by women that aren't on this list is because I read indiscriminately - publication dates don't really matter to me, I just want to read books that appeal or that are recommended to me, so often new books do pass me by until they appear on lists like this!

From the longlist I've instantly reserved 4 books from the library, and added a couple of other ones to my 'might get round to some day' list - there are a few that just don't appeal at all but it might be that if they make the shortlist (announced in March) I am tempted to try them.

I don't think that I am even going to attempt to read the entire long (or short) list as a challenge but this is definitely a list that has added a lot of books to my TBR piles.




As an aside books published between 1st April 2024 and 31st March 2025 were eligible for the prize and here are a few of the books that I've read which fit this criteria and that I am sad didn't make the cut:

• Between Two Rivers: Ancient Mesopotamia and the Birth of History by Dr Moudhy Al-Rashid (Hodder & Stoughton)
• Broken Threads by Mishal Husain (Fourth Estate)
• Catland: Feline Enchantment and the Making of the Modern World by Katherine Hughes (Harper Collins)
• A Mudlarking Year: Finding Treasure in Every Season by Lara Maiklem (Bloomsbury)
• Poet, Mystic, Widow, Wife: The Extraordinary Lives of Medieval Women by Hetta Howes (Bloomsbury)



 

Micro Review 10 (2025)

 

Between Two Rivers: Ancient Mesopotamia and the Birth of History by Moudhy Al-Rashid (Hodder and Stoughton)

After reading Elif Shafak's There Are Rivers in the Sky last autumn I realised that while I am very familiar with the Greek and Roman histories/origin stories and somewhat familiar with Ancient Egypt I knew nothing about Ancient Mesopotamia.

From reading the the first two volumes of Sapiens: A Graphic History from Yuval Noah Harari I came across some parts of Ancient Mesopotamian history thanks to his featuring Hammurabi and his laws but I was still in the dark...

Just as I started looking for recommendations by other classicists I saw Between Two Rivers being talked about online and then it appeared on NetGalley - hurrah!

I found this book to be a great introduction to the subject, Al-Rashid takes us right back to the beginning and explains where/who we are talking about and then using archaeological finds talks us through how this part of history has been decoded and the cuneiforms translated to give us our current understanding.

As ever when working with dates BCE it did take me a while to work out the 'when' was - especially when Al-Rashid just says in the 18th century BCE but that it just my poor grasp on time and not a fault with the book! I really liked the little insights into the author's life as they helped bring an unfamiliar world in to a context I could relate to, but there weren't so many of them that you felt it was an autobiography hung around a history book.

The one thing I would really have found useful is a timeline that matched the Mesopotamian events to happenings in the Greek/Egyptian/wider-world and it might be that this is something that is in the physical finished copy and just not reproduced in the electronic proof I read - I've got a copy of the book on order so when it comes out towards the end of the month I can check for this. If it isn't there I shall have to make my own!

Right I'm now off to find a translation of Gilgamesh and some more entry level history books as I'm now fascinated by this new period in history!

Many thanks to Hodder & Stoaghton for the advance copy via NetGalley

Micro Review 9 (2025)

 

Just My Type by Simon Garfield (Profile Books)

Last year I read two of Garfield's shorter books about specific fonts and found them fascinating and so I knew that I had to put his longer book about them on my Christmas list - thankfully Father Christmas let my parents know and Just My Type was under the tree for me in December!

This has been a brilliant book to dip in and out of during tea breaks as it is split into lots of short chapters about fonts, design and printing in general with these interspersed with event shorter chapters on specific fonts.

As the daughter of a printer, someone who used to be really into calligraphy, and an avid consumer of the printed word I can't understand why it has taken me over 10 years to discover this book but better late than never! I can also imagine the 'fun' that the typesetter had incorporating all of the different fonts (sometimes in the same sentence) in to the text and still managing to keep the book legible.

As with any book that goes into such detail there are going to be some bits that weren't quite so interesting but these were few and far apart in this one and I am now looking forward to a visit to the St Bride's Print Foundation that a friend and I have booked for late spring.

As an aside the BBC aired a wonderful programme recently all about how the modern printing process works and it made a brilliant companion watch to this book, and this is currently still available to watch on the BBC iPlayer