‘Big books by blokes about battles’: why we need the Women’s prize for nonfiction
Authors and publishers discuss the gender imbalance in nonfiction writing, and ask whether the newly announced award can redress it
‘Close your eyes and think of a historian, and most people see an elderly white man,” says classicist and author Mary Beard. This stereotypical view of what experts look like means that “there is a bit of a ‘big books by blokes about battles syndrome’” when it comes to acclaimed nonfiction writing. So, she adds, the newly announced Women’s prize for nonfiction will be “very useful”.
The Women’s prize for fiction was set up in 1996 after no female writers were shortlisted for the Booker prize in 1991. For almost 30 years, the prize has been “consistently excellent”, says Natalie Haynes, who writes both nonfiction, such as the bestselling Pandora’s Jar: Women in the Greek Myths, and fiction, including A Thousand Ships, which was shortlisted for the Women’s prize in 2020. “In a way it seems bonkers that they didn’t [start a nonfiction prize] ages ago,” Haynes adds. When it comes to nonfiction prizes, only 35% of winners in the past 10 years were women, according to research commissioned for the Women’s prize looking at seven major UK nonfiction prizes. The new prize is “not about taking the spotlight away from the brilliant male writers, it’s about adding the women in”, Kate Mosse, the founding director of the Women’s prize, told the Guardian when the news was announced.
