The Women’s Prize Trust this week announced its intention to create a new annual book prize, the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction. This UK charity, which champions equity for women in
the world of books and masterminds the Women’s Prize for Fiction, is currently seeking sponsorship to support a launch later this year.
Kate Mosse, the Women’s Prize for Fiction Founder Director, novelist, non-fiction author and playwright:
“This is an extremely exciting moment in the history of the Women’s Prize. Since we launched twenty-eight years ago, we have celebrated and amplified the voices of hundreds of amazing novelists, pressing their books into the hands of millions of readers. We are confident that our new non-fiction sister prize will do the same for those extraordinary non-fiction authors, many of whom do not receive the attention they deserve. The result is that readers are short-changed. We are now seeking corporate partners open to joining our family of sponsors.
Together, we can champion exceptional women’s narrative non-fiction on a global stage. This is the time to be bold.”
Building on its track record as one of the most influential and popular literary prizes, the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction will further amplify female voices, whilst celebrating books that inform,
challenge, disrupt, and offer solace and connection. The impetus to launch the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction was motivated by new research which demonstrates a clear inequality in both consumer visibility (through media coverage and prize announcements) and author remuneration.
This research found that female non-fiction writers, in comparison to their male counterparts, are:
● Less likely to be reviewed in the UK national media: only 26.5% of non-fiction reviews in national newspapers was allocated to books by female writers, according to their analysis.
● Less likely to appear in the ‘Best Books of 2022’ newspaper articles: only 33.7% of the non-fiction books selected in 2022 were written by female writers.
● Less likely to be shortlisted, or win, non-fiction book prizes: only 35.5% of books awarded a non-fiction prize over the past ten years were written by a female writer, across seven UK non-fiction prizes.
● More likely to receive a lower advance: data provided by ALCS* shows that female authors’ median earnings have fallen by 16.6% over the past five years compared to a 13.5% drop experienced by male writers. This gender pay gap has also increased over the same period from 33.3% to 35.7%.
Supported by literary agents, publishers, journalists and award-winning writers and businesswomen – including Martha Lane Fox, Suzannah Lipscomb, Kate Williams, Afua Hirsch, Anita Anand, Hallie Rubenhold, Mary Ann Sieghart, and Melanie Eusebe – the launch of the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction aims to combat gender imbalance by:
● leveraging the power of the Women’s Prize brand, with a platform, which currently reaches a global community of 95 million readers
● attracting media attention and building author profiles, replicating the Women’s Prize for Fiction campaign, which annually secures two thousand pieces of coverage with an equivalent PR value of £19 million
● galvanising consumer interest and increasing book sales and rights deals worldwide
● future-proofing writing careers through advocating for fair remuneration.
The Charlotte Aitken Trust, a charity set up by the former literary agent Gillon Aitken on behalf of his late daughter has generously awarded the £30,000 winner’s prize money for a three-year
period and a statuette for each winner named ‘the Charlotte’, with the Women’s Prize Trust now seeking additional investments to fund the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction. A deadline of 1 May
2023 has been confirmed to enable the Prize to launch in time for the 2024 Prize cycle.
Rachel Cugnoni, Trustee, the Charlotte Aitken Trust:
“Fiction and non-fiction have always been different ways of telling a different kind of truth. But fact and fiction are very different things indeed and the quality of truth we get from reading very good non-fiction from trusted sources has never been more important. So, today’s announcement of the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction to sit shoulder to shoulder with the Fiction Prize is a timely one and the Charlotte Aitken Trust could not be more proud to be supporting both the Prize and the role of women’s voices in our understanding of the world.”
The Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction will be awarded annually and be open to all female writers from across the globe, regardless of background who are published in the UK and writing in English.
The Women’s Prize for Fiction is now in its 28th year, is awarded annually for the best full-length novel of the year written in English and published in the UK. The winner receives £30,000, anonymously endowed, along with a limited-edition bronze statuette known as the ‘Bessie’, created and donated by the artist Grizel Niven.
