Alice Albinia longlisted for the 2024 Women’s Prize
The 16-book longlist for the inaugural Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction is a very exciting group of books indeed. Congratulations to Alice Albinia for - so deservedly - being on it.
It feels so important that this prize has been set up, and I really like what the Chair of the judges, Professor Suzannah Lipscomb says about it in her interview in the Bookseller:
“There is less review space, [women’s non-fiction is] less likely to be recognised by prizes, [it experiences] smaller advances and the gender pay gap in this has increased over the last five years.
"You can look at that research and think, ‘Well, either women don’t write as well as men’ or that something structural is going on over the last couple of millennia of men being the authority… I think for some, non-fiction is still perceived man’s game, and that fewer women have been recognised for their contribution to non fiction. So this prize is about starting to change this and about bringing attention to excellent, rigorous books by women that are really well written and saying women can still write with authority.”
Lipscomb described her experience of judging the prize as “phenomenal” and said reading the submissions had “helped me learn how to structure and how to write”. She added: “There is much here that is about challenging the status quo and about redressing wrongs and exposing hypocrisy... there were things I would not have known about and now I am so much better informed.”
She described the books in general as “genre-defining” and added: “There is a sense in which the [longlisted] authors are owning their subjectivity, many of them and not all. That feels like something about the zeitgeist, I feel like if the prize had been launched 10 years ago, this would not have been the case.
“I think there has been a tendency to put a book by a woman in a memoir category when it could also go in the smart-thinking category for example... so the genre-defining nature of these books mean that booksellers have to really reckon with how to categorise men and women’s non-fiction... That makes a difference of course because smart thinking books are more likely to be on the tables the front of the shops.”
The other great judges on the panel are are fair fashion campaigner Venetia La Manna; academic, author and consultant Professor Nicola Rollock; biographer and journalist Anne Sebba; and author and 2018 winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction Kamila Shamsie. The shortlist is announced on 27th March.