Naomi Klein and Madhumita Murgia, the first AI editor of the Financial Times, are both longlisted for inaugural £30,000 Women’s Prize Non-Fiction as Penguin Random House (PRH) secures nine of the 16 nominations (see full longlist below).
Across its nine nods, there are three for imprint Allen Lane, while Bloomsbury has two titles longlisted. HarperCollins, Pan Macmillan, Profile, Atlantic Books and Fitzcarraldo all have one book in the running.
Klein is recognised for Doppleganger (Allen Lane) alongside fellow bestselling author Anna Funder, nominated for Wifedom (Viking).
Across the 16-strong longlist there is a prize-winning author of fiction and non-fiction (Alice Albinia), two published poets (Cat Bohannon and Safiya Sinclair) and five journalists – trauma journalist Patricia Evangelista, Observer chief art critic Laura Cumming, Tribune staff writer Grace Blakeley, freelance writer Lucy Jones and Murgia, the first AI of the Financial Times.
British charity campaigner Marianne Brooker is also longlisted alongside American and British academics from major universities – Tiya Miles from Harvard University, Leah Redmond Chang from George Washington and Sarah Oglivie from Oxford, Noreen Masud from Bristol and Joya Chatterji of Cambridge.
In regards to nationality, there are seven British authors, three Americans, one Italian-American, one Jamaican, one Canadian, one Australian, one Indian, and one author from the Philippines.
Organisers told The Bookseller there had been 120 entries overall. They said: “The 2024 longlist features writing drawn from a wide range of disciplines, from neuroscience, biology, psychoanalysis, history and philosophy to economics, politics, AI, race, art and natural history, with several of the books combining multiple genres within one work.
“There are memoirs that will enlighten and move the reader – from life within a militant religious sect, to a pilgrimage across Britain’s flatlands; from a narrative that explores life in art and the power of a painting, to a deeply personal story that shows us the limitations of our care system.”
The full longlist is as follows:
- Alice Albinia – The Britannias: An Island Quest (Allen Lane)
- Grace Blakely – Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts and the Death of Freedom (Bloomsbury)
- Cat Bohannon – Eve: How The Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution (Hutchinson Heinemann)
- Marianne Brooker – Intervals (Fitzcarraldo Editions)
- Joya Chatterji –Shadows at Noon: The South Asian Twentieth Century (Bodley Head)
- Laura Cumming – Thunderclap: A Memoir of Art and Life and Sudden Death (Chatto & Windus)
- Patricia Evangelista – Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in the Philippines (Atlantic Books; Grove Press)
- Anna Funder – Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life (Viking)
- Lucy Jones – Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth and Motherhood (Allen Lane)
- Naomi Klein – Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World (Allen Lane)
- Noreen Masud – A Flat Place (Hamish Hamilton)
- Tiya Miles – All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake (Profile Books)
- Sarah Ogilvie – The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes who Created the Oxford English Dictionary (Chatto & Windus)
- Leah Redmond Chang – Young Queens: The Intertwined Lives of Catherine de’ Medici, Elisabeth de Valois and Mary, Queen of Scots (Bloomsbury)
- Safiya Sinclair – How to Say Babylon: A Jamaican Memoir (4th Estate)
- Madhumita Murgia – Code-Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI (Picador)
