The Women’s prize for non-fiction celebrates excellence, originality and accessibility in narrative non-fiction written by women. This prize acknowledges that while great gains have been made in representation for women in fiction, their voices remain systemically underrepresented in non-fiction.
In only its third year, the 2026 shortlist covers a diverse range of topics, examining themes from creativity and wellbeing to conflict and family ties.
Here we have enlisted six experts across diverse fields to guide you through the nominations for 2026.
Art Cure: The Science of How the Arts Transform Our Health by Daisy Fancourt
Cornerstone Press/EXPeditions
Daisy Fancourt has written and spoken extensively about the benefit of art practices on health. In Art Cure, the positive outcomes of even a few minutes spent listening to music, visiting a gallery or creating art are explained using scientific research and quantifiable data.
Each chapter starts with a case study and within these examples, Fancourt achieves the difficult task of merging art with science. Complicated concepts, such as the multi-faceted construct of happiness, are explained in a way that is accessible and appealing.
In her 2017 book, Arts in Health: Designing Interventions, Fancourt added substance to the impulses of artists and therapists using creative interventions to promote health and wellbeing. The work became seminal for those working in this area. Art Cure reaches a larger audience. Anyone concerned with health will be convinced that an arts practice is one of the pillars for achieving a life well-lived.
Barrie Llewelyn is a senior lecturer in creative writing in the faculty of business and creative industries
Hamish Hamilton/Mayank Austen Soofi
In Mother Mary Comes to Me, Arundhati Roy marks the passing of her late mother by fathoming her on the page for the first time in her writing life. “I wrote versions of her in my books”, Roy explains, “but I never wrote her”.
Doing so is difficult, even painful for Roy because of who her mother was and how she mothered. Mary Roy was a committed headmistress, a tireless advocate for Syrian Christians and an activist whose campaigning set precedents for women’s inheritance rights across India. But as a parent, she was mercurial and recalcitrant. A bundle of contradictions, Roy’s mother compelled her daughter to think and be free, only to then rage against her for the thoughts she had and the freedoms she claimed.
Mother Mary Comes To Me stands as Roy’s literary memorial to her “dreamer, warrior, teacher” mother (a phrase inscribed on her headstone). But the book also pays tribute to all those other dreamer-warrior-teachers – family, lovers and comrades – with whom Roy has built friendship and solidarity. Instructing us to read the book as we would one of her novels, Roy has written a memoir that is as uncompromising as her life – and her mother’s, too.
Dominic O’Key is a teaching associate in contemporary literature
Nation of Strangers : Rebuilding Home in the 21st Century by Ece Temelkuran
Canongate Books/Maximilian Gödecke
Who are you? Why did you leave? How will you survive? When will you go home?
These four questions, so often directed at those who have left their place of birth and moved elsewhere, frame Temelkuran’s powerful set of letters to other strangers. At the heart of Nation of Strangers is a call for the recognition of a silent majority of those unhomed, in her case by fascism.
Rather than resort to the names and labels states have for those who move across borders – exiles, refugees, migrants – she chooses to define herself and others on her own terms. Her letters call for an understanding of being unhomed as a collective condition, one that affects the lives of an increasing number of people around the world. And while such an account is devastating, narrating her encounters with other strangers, she offers glimpses of hope for a new future where it becomes possible to rebuild home.
Michaela Benson is a professor in public sociology
The Finest Hotel in Kabul: A People’s History of Afghanistan by Lyse Doucet
Hutchinson Heinemann/Paula Bronstein
Lyse Doucet, the seasoned BBC journalist and current foreign affairs editor, uses Kabul’s Inter-Continental Hotel as a lens to understand Afghanistan’s social history over the past half a century. Sitting on top of a hill overlooking much of the city, the hotel has symbolised since its launch in the 1960s, Kabul’s relationship with the wider world in general but the west in particular.
In The Finest Hotel in Kabul, Doucet recounts how the hotel has hosted guests from Pan Am flight crews and Afghan socialite fashion designers, to mujaheddin commanders, terrorists of global renown, Taliban leaders and Nato officials. Doucet goes beyond a focus on “big men”, however, and chronicles the experiences of the hotel’s staff.
Doucet deftly illustrates some of the ways in which ordinary Kabuli people have navigated the changing and deeply unpredictable world around them. Against the swaths of conventional journalistic accounts of Afghanistan – few of which depict the country’s people as rounded individuals seeking to lead respectable lives – this book is a powerful, important and corrective work. It deserves to be read widely. One can be hope this beautifully written and structured book will help to reorientate public and policy conversations about Afghanistan.
Magnus Marsden is a professor of social anthropology
Artists, Siblings, Visionaries: The Lives and Loves of Gwen and Augustus John by Judith Mackrell
Picador/Fred Henson
Augustus John’s volcanic life, art, and connections once made him the most famous artist in the land. But – given the continuing tremors from her retrospectives at Sussex’s Pallant House Gallery, in Cardiff, and soon the National Gallery of Scotland – the more subtle work of his sister Gwen John, with its guarded intimacies and chalky palette, looks likely to eclipse his, as he predicted.
The pair have recently been the subjects of separate biographies. To untangle their threads, however, Judith Mackrell provides less new material in Artist Siblings than a persuasive case for considering them together. She improvises as a novelist might on their motivations, deftly sketching the web of their intricate cross-channel bonds. Sitters become lovers, friends become family, and dreams of artistic freedom and unconventional living lead through frenzied fecundity to unhappy ménages à quatre or deafening quiet in Paris. Places and notable people in first blush loom nearer than canvases, but this story of bare feet and paintbrushes, caravans, fame, depression, pride, and self-reliance is rapidly, ripely told.
Adrian Paterson is a lecturer in the school of English, media and creative arts
Hotel Exile: Paris in the Shadow of War by Jane Rogoyska
Allen Lane/Hal Howe
The time is Paris in the 1930s and 1940s, the place is the iconic Hotel Lutetia on the left bank. The story is not about the Lutetia itself, but if its walls could speak they would offer similar glimpses into the lives and events portrayed in Jane Rogoyska’s fast-paced book.
In Hotel Exile, Rogoyska offers moving snapshots of different communities and individuals who crossed its threshhold before, during, and after the second world war. There were the German, Jewish and communist exiles in the 1930s, and then the German intelligence officers during the the Nazi occupation of France from 1940 to 1944, as well as the French collaborators. You get a sense of the war throughout the book, but it is when the Lutetia becomes a repatriation centre for deportees after 1944 that we see the full complexity and tragedy of war – and of survival.
by Ludivine Broch is a reader in history
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