We are delighted to announce the 2025 Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction longlist with authors drawn from a wide range of professional spheres and expertise, including a music icon, human rights lawyer, political adviser, marine biologist, NHS palliative care doctor and Pulitzer Prize winner.
These 16 books are an incisive and original reading list for 2025. Varying in subject matter, style and genre, readers will find agenda-setting reportage on contemporary issues alongside revisionist histories and myth-busting biographies; memoirs of self-determination and intimate narratives that shine a light on ordinary people combine with real-life criminal cases, notorious and forgotten, whilst a handful of the books defy genre-classification, weaving multiple disciplines into one compelling narrative work.
What unites these diverse titles, that boast so many different disciplines and genres, is the accomplishment of the writing, the originality of the storytelling and the incisiveness of the research. Here are books that provoke debate and discussion, that offer insight into new experiences and perspectives, and that bring overlooked stories back to life and recognition. Amongst this stellar list, there are also reads that expertly steer us through the most pressing issues of our time, show the resilience of the human spirit, alongside others that elucidate the dangers of unchecked power, the consequence of oppression and the need for action and defiance.
Kavita Puri, Chair of Judges
The 2025 Women's Prize for Non-Fiction Longlist
The full list in alphabetical order by author surname is:
- Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World by Anne Applebaum (published by Allen Lane, Penguin Press, Penguin Random House)
- Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age by Eleanor Barraclough (published by Profile Books)
- The Eagle and the Hart: The Tragedy of Richard II and Henry IV by Helen Castor (published by Allen Lane, Penguin Press, Penguin Random House)
- A Thousand Threads by Neneh Cherry (published by Fern Press, Vintage, Penguin Random House)
- The Story of a Heart by Rachel Clarke (published by Abacus, Little, Brown Book Group, Hachette)
- Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton (published by Canongate Books)
- Ootlin by Jenni Fagan (published by Hutchinson Heinemann, Cornerstone, Penguin Random House)
- Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love and the Hidden Order of Life by Lulu Miller (published by ONE, Pushkin Press)
- Agent Zo: The Untold Story of Fearless WW2 Resistance Fighter Elżbieta Zawacka by Clare Mulley (published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, Orion Publishing Group, Hachette)
- By the Fire We Carry: The Generations-Long Fight for Justice on Native Land by Rebecca Nagle (published by William Collins, HarperCollins)
- Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prideaux (published by Faber & Faber)
- What the Wild Sea Can Be: The Future of the World’s Ocean by Helen Scales (published by Grove Press, Atlantic Books)
- The Peepshow: The Murders at 10 Rillington Place by Kate Summerscale (published by Bloomsbury Circus, Bloomsbury Publishing)
- Sister in Law: Fighting for Justice in a System Designed by Men by Harriet Wistrich (published by Torva, Transworld, Penguin Random House)
- Tracker by Alexis Wright (published by And Other Stories)
- Private Revolutions: Coming of Age in a New China by Yuan Yang (published by Bloomsbury Circus, Bloomsbury Publishing)
