Women’s Prize for Non‑Fiction shortlist spotlights war, exile and the healing power of art

A once‑grand hotel in Kabul where Afghans tried to outlast decades of war. A shabby Paris pension sheltering refugees in the shadow of occupation. A Kerala classroom and courtroom where a school principal forced open India’s inheritance laws. A London clinic where a doctor prescribes poetry alongside pills.

Those are some of the rooms in which the stories on this year’s Women’s Prize for Non‑Fiction shortlist unfold, announced Wednesday night at an event in central London.

The prize, now in its third year, named six books that judges said combine deep research with urgent, humane storytelling on subjects ranging from Afghanistan and wartime Paris to exile, health care and British art.

“These are books of authority, told with humanity,” chair of judges Thangam Debbonaire said in a statement released with the shortlist. She called the selections “an urgent antidote to mis‑ and dis‑information, written with high standards of scholarship” that deliver “rich and original insights, in what often feels like a fragmented and uncertain world.”

The shortlist

The six books in contention for the £30,000 award are:

• “The Finest Hotel in Kabul: A People’s History of Afghanistan” by Lyse Doucet
• “Hotel Exile: Paris in the Shadow of War” by Jane Rogoyska
• “Mother Mary Comes to Me” by Arundhati Roy
• “Nation of Strangers: Rebuilding Home in the 21st Century” by Ece Temelkuran
• “Art Cure: The Science of How the Arts Transform Our Health” by Daisy Fancourt
• “Artists, Siblings, Visionaries: The Lives and Loves of Gwen and Augustus John” by Judith Mackrell

The nonfiction prize, run by the Women’s Prize Trust charity in the United Kingdom, is open to narrative nonfiction written in English by women of any nationality and published in the U.K. within the eligible year. The winner will be announced June 11 at the trust’s summer party in Bedford Square Gardens in London, alongside the Women’s Prize for Fiction.

The judges — Debbonaire, an arts campaigner and former Labour member of Parliament; structural engineer and author Roma Agrawal; entrepreneur Nicola Elliott; novelist Nina Stibbe; and judge and crime writer Nicola Williams — selected the shortlist from a 16‑book longlist published in February.

War, exile and “home”

Three of the shortlisted titles converge on questions of war, displacement and belonging.

In her debut book, Lyse Doucet, the BBC’s long‑time chief international correspondent, turns a Kabul landmark into a lens on modern Afghanistan. “The Finest Hotel in Kabul” traces the lives of staff, guests and neighbors of a once‑glamorous hotel as the country passes through monarchy, Soviet invasion, civil war, Taliban rule, NATO occupation and the U.S. withdrawal.

The project extends decades of on‑the‑ground reporting into what Doucet has described in interviews as a “people’s history” of Afghanistan, foregrounding local voices over international power brokers.

Jane Rogoyska’s “Hotel Exile: Paris in the Shadow of War” offers a European counterpoint. The British writer, whose earlier work has focused on the Katyn massacre and postwar displacement, reconstructs the life of a modest Left Bank hotel that became home to refugees, resisters and stateless wanderers as France faced occupation and liberation.

Both books use the confined, transient space of a hotel to explore precarious sanctuary and the thin line between safety and danger in wartime cities.

Turkish writer and political thinker Ece Temelkuran widens the frame in “Nation of Strangers: Rebuilding Home in the 21st Century.” Written in the form of letters from “one stranger to another,” the book argues that exile is no longer confined to refugees or dissidents, but has become a defining condition in an age of populism, economic precarity and climate disruption.

Temelkuran, a former columnist who left Turkey after criticizing President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government, blends memoir, political analysis and philosophy to ask how “home” might be rebuilt through solidarity among people who feel uprooted.

Together, the three books align the shortlist with current debates over refugees, borders and democratic backsliding across Europe and beyond.

Intimate lives, legal and artistic revolutions

If one strand of the list looks outward to wars and migration, another turns inward to family, law and art.

Arundhati Roy, best known internationally for her 1997 Booker Prize‑winning novel “The God of Small Things” and for political essays critical of U.S. foreign policy and Hindu nationalism, is shortlisted for “Mother Mary Comes to Me,” a memoir of her mother, Mary Roy.

Mary Roy, a head teacher and women’s rights advocate in Kerala, brought a landmark case before India’s Supreme Court in the 1980s challenging the inheritance rules of the Travancore Christian Succession Act. In 1986, the court ruled in her favor, affirming that Syrian Christian women in Kerala were entitled to equal shares of family property under the Indian Succession Act.

Roy’s book, published in 2025, braids that legal history with the story of a difficult mother‑daughter relationship. Speaking about writing the memoir, Roy has said that “one half of me was taking the pain, the other half was taking notes,” describing a process of drafting at night and confronting the material again in the morning.

Judith Mackrell’s “Artists, Siblings, Visionaries: The Lives and Loves of Gwen and Augustus John” returns to early 20th‑century Britain to examine another family whose private dynamics shaped public culture. The dual biography recounts the entwined careers of painter siblings Gwen and Augustus John, fixtures of bohemian circles in London and Paris.

Augustus was celebrated in his lifetime as a leading British artist, his flamboyant persona and portraits of celebrities making him a national figure. Gwen worked more quietly, painting spare, introspective portraits and interiors. Criticism in recent decades has increasingly treated her as the greater artist.

Mackrell, a former dance critic and experienced biographer, uses their lives to probe how gendered expectations about ambition, domesticity and genius determined who was hailed as a “master” and who faded into footnotes.

Art on prescription

The sixth shortlisted book, “Art Cure: The Science of How the Arts Transform Our Health,” sits at the intersection of culture and medicine.

Its author, Daisy Fancourt, is a professor of psychoneuroimmunology and epidemiology at University College London and leads a World Health Organization Collaborating Centre for Arts and Health. Her research has been cited by public health agencies in the U.K. and abroad in discussions about social prescribing — referrals by doctors to non‑medical activities such as choir singing, museum visits or creative writing groups.

“Art Cure” synthesizes a growing body of studies on how engagement with music, visual arts, dance, theater and reading can influence mental health, immune function, cognitive decline, chronic pain and loneliness. The book explains proposed biological and social mechanisms, from stress pathways and inflammatory responses to social bonding and cognitive stimulation, and considers how health systems might integrate arts‑based interventions.

By elevating this work, the shortlist brings a technical, data‑driven field into the same arena as literary memoir and geopolitical reportage.

A prize born of imbalance

The Women’s Prize for Non‑Fiction was announced in 2023 as a sister to the better‑known Women’s Prize for Fiction, which was founded in the 1990s following an all‑male shortlist for the Booker Prize.

Organizers say the new award was created in response to evidence that women writing nonfiction lag their male counterparts in reviews, awards and sales despite robust output.

Research commissioned by the Women’s Prize Trust and carried out with Nielsen BookData found that across a five‑year period, only about 26.5% of nonfiction reviews in major U.K. newspapers went to books by women. Women made up roughly 35.5% of winners of leading British nonfiction prizes over the previous decade.

The same analysis reported that among top‑selling titles, women accounted for about 11% of science authors, 17% of politics authors and 30% of history authors. The gender pay gap in nonfiction earnings was estimated to have widened from about one‑third to more than 35% over recent years.

Kate Mosse, novelist and founder of the Women’s Prize, has said the nonprofit’s aim is not to exclude men but to “add the women in,” arguing that the market and media environment still under‑recognize women’s contributions, especially in fields such as history, science and politics.

The prize is open to “any woman writing in English” whose book is published in the U.K. within the eligibility window. Organizers have said that includes trans women, a policy that places the prize in a specific position within Britain’s polarized debates over single‑sex awards.

Growing influence

In its first two years, the nonfiction prize has gone to Naomi Klein for “Doppelganger,” an exploration of conspiracy culture and identity, and to palliative care doctor Rachel Clarke for “The Story of a Heart,” about pediatric heart transplantation and organ donation.

Those wins, along with the annual shortlists, have quickly become marketing tools. Major bookshops now curate Women’s Prize for Non‑Fiction tables, libraries build reading lists around the longlist, and titles often see bumps in sales and international rights deals following the announcements.

This year’s nonfiction shortlist will appear alongside the fiction shortlist at Women’s Prize LIVE, a public event in London in June that features readings and discussions with the authors.

For now, the six nonfiction titles move into a 10‑week final stretch. On June 11, one of these books — whether about a Kabul guesthouse, a Paris boarding house, a Kerala lawsuit, an imagined “nation of strangers,” the neural circuitry of a string quartet or the quiet genius of Gwen John — will be called to the stage and formally added to a new, still‑forming canon of nonfiction by women.