‘Big books by blokes about battles’: why we need the Women’s prize for nonfiction

‘Close your eyes and think of a historian, and most people see an elderly white man,” says classicist and author Mary Beard. This stereotypical view of what experts look like means that “there is a bit of a ‘big books by blokes about battles syndrome’” when it comes to acclaimed nonfiction writing. So, she adds, the newly announced Women’s prize for nonfiction will be “very useful”.

The Women’s prize for fiction was set up in 1996 after no female writers were shortlisted for the Booker prize in 1991. For almost 30 years, the prize has been “consistently excellent”, says Natalie Haynes, who writes both nonfiction, such as the bestselling Pandora’s Jar: Women in the Greek Myths, and fiction, including A Thousand Ships, which was shortlisted for the Women’s prize in 2020. “In a way it seems bonkers that they didn’t [start a nonfiction prize] ages ago,” Haynes adds. When it comes to nonfiction prizes, only 35% of winners in the past 10 years were women, according to research commissioned for the Women’s prize looking at seven major UK nonfiction prizes. The new prize is “not about taking the spotlight away from the brilliant male writers, it’s about adding the women in”, Kate Mosse, the founding director of the Women’s prize, told the Guardian when the news was announced.

That’s not to say that things weren’t already changing: journalist Sally Hayden won the 2022 Orwell prize for political writing with her debut My Fourth Time, We Drowned, about the migrant crisis, and was also on the shortlist for the UK’s main annual nonfiction award, the Baillie Gifford prize. There were five women and one man up for the 2022 award, which was won by author and academic Katherine Rundell for Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne. “It was the first female-majority shortlist ever, I was told, which I was really proud to be a part of,” Hayden says.

Even so, “the statistics say that nonfiction books written by women sell less, are reviewed less and are awarded less,” Hayden adds – so if the new Women’s prize can improve those figures, all the better.

Nonfiction prizes in general “feel much less widely known than their fiction equivalents”, notes Hayden’s editor at HarperCollins, Jo Thompson. “I imagine most people would quickly call to mind the Booker and the Women’s prize, whereas the Cundill [history] prize or the Baillie Gifford aren’t household names in the same way. Especially having lost the Costa prize, which was devastating, having the Women’s prize brand supporting nonfiction can only be a great thing.”

There is certainly no lack of appetite from publishers when it comes to commissioning nonfiction books by women, Thompson says, but it remains the case that certain types of books are more rarely written by women. “The problem often sprawls beyond publishing in the sense that when there are way fewer women in, say, economics or business or archaeology, that funnels into who writes about those areas for the mainstream.”

Rachel Hewitt, author of nonfiction books including Map of a Nation: A Biography of the Ordnance Survey and the forthcoming In Her Nature, about the relationship between women and the natural world, agrees. “Because many nonfiction writers come from academic backgrounds, inevitably the gender biases in academic subjects – such as the poor representation of women in ‘hefty’ subjects such as astrophysics, and the relatively high prevalence of female scholars in literary and linguistic disciplines, in which there might be more of an emphasis on narrative voice – will be replicated in the trade nonfiction world.” There’s also a possibility that certain subjects are taken more seriously “because they’re dominated by men”, she adds.

There does certainly seem to be a stereotype that, as Haynes puts it, “when men write about something, they’re writing about a universal experience”, while women write nonfiction that is more narrative and personal. It would be “a gross disservice to say that’s the norm”, says Thompson. Yet, “even just thinking of the proposals I’ve seen lately, it’d be hard to deny that women much more often wind up blending expertise with a personal framing. And sometimes that will be a traumatic or difficult element of their life – say, grief or fertility or otherness.”

These kind of books can, of course, be just as important and powerful as information-packed doorstoppers, but it seems unbalanced that women are largely the ones writing them. “It’s obviously a big problem if authors feel they need to use their private stories just because, in callous terms, it might offer a PR hook,” Thompson says. “I don’t think it’s a gender dynamic publishers acknowledge very consciously.”

“Publishers conventionally go for what they already knows sells, so it can be a vicious circle,” explains Margaret Busby, who became Britain’s youngest – and first Black – female publisher when she and Clive Allison co-founded the publishing house Allison & Busby in the 1960s.

The fact remains that women and other marginalised groups are just not always taken as seriously as men. “I know for sure that I was not considered on a par with my male business partner, whether by the window cleaner or the bank manager,” Busby says, “though, of course, my being Black also played a part in that.

“I often ‘joke’ that people who knew nothing about the imprint Allison & Busby beyond seeing it on the spine of a book assumed I must be a dead white man.”

But it’s not just the way female writers are perceived that creates inequality in nonfiction writing – there are practical barriers to women, too, Hewitt points out. “Writing nonfiction tends to involve research and travel, including visits to archives and interviews, and the freedom and disposable income necessary to conduct that research are hugely shaped by gendered gaps in pay, leisure time and domestic responsibilities such as childcare.” Prize money, and the opportunities that come with being nominated for prizes, “go some way to helping women writers carve out the time and resources necessary to research and write nonfiction texts”, Hewitt believes.

Once female nonfiction writers are afforded the same time, money and recognition as their male counterparts, a specific prize for women won’t be necessary – but we are a long way off, Haynes says. “It’s been illegal to underpay me because of my gender since before I was born. And yet, unaccountably, it still appears to be happening.

“Given the rate of progress that we’re getting, I like the Women’s prize’s chances of being necessary certainly beyond my lifetime.”

The fact that a prize such as this exists is a cause for celebration and hope, though, the women I speak to agree. As Busby says: “Let’s look forward to the day when excellent and informative writing, whatever its origin, will always be accorded its due.”