Naomi Klein and Madhumita Murgia have been shortlisted for the inaugural Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction, alongside Laura Cumming, Noreen Masud, Tiya Miles and Safiya Sinclair.
The shortlist represents writers from America (Miles), Canada (Klein) and Jamaica (Sinclair), with half the list from the UK (Cumming, Masud and Murgia). Penguin Random House also makes a strong showing, with its imprints making up half the shortlist for the £30,000 prize.
Judges said the 2024 shortlist “consists of works that either challenge prevalent ideas or reclaim narratives from our past, whilst breaking new ground in non-fiction writing”. Cumming’s Thunderclap: A Memoir of Art and Life and Sudden Death (Chatto & Windus) is described as “an inventive memoir and biography about art and love which bestows upon readers a vivid and transformative experience of painting, through the work of one little known artist” while Klein’s Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World (Allen Lane) “is an innovative, playful guide through the dangers of social media and the new world of online conspiracy theories”.
A Flat Place: A memoir (Hamish Hamilton) by Masud is “a haunting yet uplifting pilgrimage across Britain’s flatlands to alleviate childhood trauma, while boldly interrupting the traditions of ‘nature cure’” and Miles’ All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake (Profile) “is a genre-defining history of American enslavement which lovingly restores humanity to those left out of the archives”.
Murgia’s Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI (Picador) is billed as “an incisive, cutting-edge exploration through human stories of how AI is reshaping and infiltrating our lives” while Sinclair’s How to Say Babylon: A Jamaican Memoir (Fourth Estate) “is a fierce, yet lyrical account inside the closed world of a Rastafarian family that offers a personal reckoning with the legacy of empire”.
