Recent Nonfiction Highlights: The 2024 Women’s Prize Shortlist

2024 is the inaugural year of the Women’s Prize for Nonfiction. Your shortlist of six books show an incredible range; what were you and the other judges looking for?

The criteria for the Women’s Prize for Nonfiction is the same as for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, with only one real tweak. The three criteria are originality, excellence, and accessibility. In nonfiction, this means originality in writing or in research, excellence in writing and research, and accessibility. Of course, ‘accessibility’, is a word that is very much in the eye of the beholder. I think perhaps each one of us, as judges, took it to mean something different.

So it’s definitely a subjective process. But for me, I came to understand it as a book that is a compelling read, that you want to carry on reading.

How many books came under consideration?

120, or thereabout. The way the prize is judged is that there were books submitted by publishers and books that we called in. Every one of those books was read by at least two judges in the run up to the longlist. As chair, I thought I should read a bit more than my allocation, because I thought there were books on which I ought to have an opinion. But the idea is that authors know they are getting a really proper read from at least two judges.

Well, let’s have a look at the six books that made it through to the 2024 nonfiction shortlist. I think it’s very strong. Shall we start with Laura Cumming’s Thunderclap? It brings together art history and memoir—why is it one of the best nonfiction books of the year?

This is a genre-defying book, as many of them are. It examines the life and work of Carel Fabritius, the 17th-century Dutch artist – who painted ‘The Goldfinch’, among other things. He actually only left just over a dozen paintings, and has been under-recognised in assessments of the Golden Age of Art. He’s always referred to as a ‘missing link’ between Vermeer and Rembrandt, as if he doesn’t stand for anything himself.

“Mary Ann Sieghart called it ‘the authority gap’: women are still expected not to be able to talk with expertise in the same way that men are”

But it’s also an examination of Cumming’s own father’s work – James Cumming, an artist in his own right. The two disparate stories are drawn together, I suppose, by what one might call memoir. There’s a connection, which is Laura herself. It’s a work of admiration of both people, and it has this incredible structure which unfurls and pulls in all manner of things along the way.

Laura Cumming has an incredible facility with words. She can describe a painting in a way that means you see more in it than when you look at it with your own eyes. She brings a lyrical quality, and it’s very, very moving.

I mentioned the structure—it is so carefully managed that there’s a revelation on the very last paragraph of the last page that leaves you with you mouth hanging open. Breathtaking. How did she do that?

I was a big fan of her earlier book about the brief and mysterious disappearance of her mother when she was a child.

On Chapel Sands, yes. Also a wonderful book.

The second book on the shortlist for the 2024 Women’s Prize for Nonfiction is Noreen Masud’s A Flat Place. It’s a meditation on landscape, of a sort. Could you tell us more?

Yes, another amazing book by a beautiful writer. Masud brings together her love of flat landscapes—she has written about flat landscapes and literature as an academic—with her experience of confinement by her father while growing up in Pakistan, and her diagnosis of complex PTSD. Flat landscapes become both a memory and a metaphor in this book. With complex PTSD, there is no one event that you can point to and say: that happened to me. It is rather a continuous environment that shapes who you are, an environment of fear. Flat landscapes are the same —there are no peaks.

She assesses, in all sorts of cool and interesting ways, this metaphor and how it plays out. It’s also a meditation on post-colonialism, what it means to be a woman of colour living in a post-colonial world. It’s revelatory, and very much more than the sum of its parts. It doesn’t sound, in my description, as amazing as it is in practice, you’ve just got to try it. It’s quite extraordinary.

Your third shortlisted title is Madhumita Murgia’s Code Dependent, which is an investigation into the impact of artificial intelligence.

This is so interesting. Madhumita Murgia is the Financial Times’ first editor of AI. She writes about the world in which AI is created, and the human consequences. Every chapter has a name like: ‘Your Livelihood,’ ‘Your Freedom,’ ‘Your Safety,’ ‘Your Writings.’

What’s fascinating about it is that you might go into it thinking it will be about the great tech companies and the men who run them. Murgia is, in theory, very positive towards technology, but she’s looking at the dark underbelly of what it means across the world, for those who are what she calls “slaves to the AI revolution,” whose job it is to monitor social media, day in day out, or who are labelling images of roads so that AI can learn what a street sign is and what a piece of tarmac looks like. Or she thinks about the consequences for those affected by the AI movement into creating ‘deep fake’ photographs, and a number of different ways in which AI can be very detrimental in people’s lives. She also looks at some of the ways in which it can be a positive, always from the human side of the story.

Would you say you primarily came away feeling frightened or reassured?

I came away never wanting to accept cookies again. It’s essential reading.

The next book on the 2024 nonfiction shortlist, Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger, also feels very timely. She looks at a case of mistaken identity, at conspiracy theory culture… Perhaps you could talk us through it, and what the judges admired about it?

This is such an interesting book. It starts, as you say, from the experience of the author being mistaken repeatedly for the writer Naomi Wolf, and her indignation about that. Because here are two women who have gone on very different directions, politically speaking. She uses that as a jumping off point to think about the way in which we all have digital doubles – thinking about our social media presences, and the way we recreate ourselves digitally.

She talks about what she terms the ‘mirror world,’ which is the way in which in the places Naomi Wolf has ended up – Steve Bannon’s show, this sort of thing – many of the stories being told by progressives go through the looking glass and become a kind of inverted version. So the ‘Big Lie’—that Trump won the election—is mirrored by the ‘Big Steal’—that Biden stole the election, for example. She examines this idea of doubling in all sorts of different ways that reflects on where we are politically, socially, and economically at this present moment.

It becomes this incredibly clever, acutely observed, often funny meditation on the moment in history in which we are living.

The fifth book on our shortlist is Harvard historian Tiya Miles’ All That She Carried. This has already been a bestseller and highly garlanded in the US, but it has been less visible on this side of the Atlantic. Would you introduce our readers?

This is a work of historical excavation. It concerns a sack that belonged to a girl called Ashley, who, when she was nine years old, was sold away from her mother Rose. Both were enslaved. This was the 1850s, and the sack was later embroidered by Ashley’s granddaughter, Ruth, who worked this incredible inscription that tells us almost everything we know about the story. It says:

My great grandmother Rose
Mother of Ashley gave her this sack when
She was sold at age of 9 in South Carolina
it held a tattered dress 3 handfulls of
pecans a braid of Roses hair. Told her
It be filled with my Love always
she never saw her again
Ashley is my grandmother
Ruth Middleton
1921

This book is what we can know about these women, the discoveries made about their identity, and the thousands of others whose stories cannot be told who experienced unimaginable horror. A people’s trauma.

How does one tell history, when the archive is so limited? She thinks about methods for marking the absences on the page, and also looking for what she calls “the chorus of collaboration.” And, when necessary, extrapolating. It’s a very powerful work that makes one think of the horrors done to Black people during the period of enslavement in America.

I can see this is not only an important avenue for a historian to go down, but an intellectually challenging one too: how to construct reliable narratives in challenging archival circumstances. Our final book, Safiya Sinclair’s How to Say Babylon appeared on Five Books recently when it was shortlisted for the National Critics Book Circle award for autobiography. It’s a memoir of a strict Rastafarian upbringing. Could you tell us more?

Yes, this is Safiya Sinclair’s first work of prose, I think. She’s a poet. And you know that when you read it, because her prose is astonishing. This is a story of her upbringing in a Rastafarian family in Jamaica, and it exposes the subjugation under which she lives. The father is the god of the household. Women are tightly controlled in what they can wear, what they can do, who they can be.

It explores her parents’ story and her experience of growing up in this environment, her breaking free, and the role of poetry in that. It’s lyrical, a completely delicious read. And it has had a lot of attention for the quality of the telling.

As I noted earlier, 2024 is the first year that there has been an award for nonfiction books from the Women’s Prize. Might you remind us of the necessity of such a prize and the challenges women face in publishing nonfiction?

Yes. I feel very strongly about this. Let me give you some of the data. When the prize was announced a year ago, the Women’s Prize commissioned research that found that, in 2022, only 26.5% of the space given by national newspapers to reviewing nonfiction was given to books by women. In the best books of the year round-ups, they found only a third of the books recommended were by women. Over seven nonfiction prizes over the course of ten years, only 35.5% of the books shortlisted were by women. Perhaps the most shocking is the gender pay gap, which is 14% across all industries in the UK, but among writers has worsened from 33.3% to 35.7%.

So, either women simply write less well than men, or something structural is going on here. I think it was Mary Ann Sieghart has called “the authority gap”: that women are still expected not to be able to talk with expertise in the same way that men are, after more than a couple of millennia of men being in positions of authority. When it comes to non-fictional subjects, women aren’t considered the authority figures. The Women’s Prize for Nonfiction is an intervention which aims to try to change the literary landscape.

One thing that was very interesting was that, as a historian, I know the ways in which women are making interventions in meaningful ways in the factual environment. Yet publishers generally send in the sorts of books that “do well for women.” So we called in a lot of books as well, and I feel we finally ended up with a good representation of what has been published. But publishers found it hard to understand, exactly in the way that the problem exists, that women can speak to subjects with expertise as well as beauty and power.

That sounds like you had to put in a lot of thought. Were you left with a sense of optimism about where we can go from here, in terms of nonfiction by women?

Absolutely. The quality of the work is out there already. We read an enormous number of wonderful books. Please, take a look at our longlist of 16 incredible books. I’m also hoping that the upshot of this prize will be that publishers commission more of this stuff, by women, because they know there’s a place now where it might be recognised.