Yahoo Lifestyle The Women's Prize for Non Fiction shortlist features six incredible stories to add to your reading list
The Women's Prize for Fiction may be celebrating its landmark 30th anniversary but its younger – and no less impressive – sibling, the Non Fiction award, marks its second outing this year and has just revealed its prestigious shortlist. The inaugural award was given to Naomi Klein for her book Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World and this year's contenders have similar heft, with books that unveil the untold stories of courageous women in World War II, offer powerful insights into modern-day China, explore our relationship with nature and grief, and delve into the realities of being a nineties pop icon.
Chair of the judges, the journalist Kavita Puri, announced the shortlist, praising it as a beautiful collection of "narratives that honour the natural world and its bond with humanity, meticulously researched stories of women challenging power, and books that illuminate complex subjects with authority, nuance and originality". She added: "These books will stay with you long after they have been read."
Here are the titles that make up the 2025 shortlist...
A Thousand Threads, Neneh Cherry
Cherry remains one of the 1990's most iconic faces. A Thousand Threads now cements the music star as a consummate storyteller. Her poignant and incisive memoir was lauded by the judges as a true tour de force. Charting her life from her childhood in rural Sweden to her heyday as a global superstar, it offers juicy insider nuggets of that era while remaining solidly an immensely personal story about navigating fame and family.
Agent Zo, Clare Mulley
A riveting account of one of World War II's secret heroines: the Polish resistance fighter Elżbieta Zawacka. She was the only woman to reach London from the Polish Home Army Command, was trained by the British SOE and dropped behind enemy lines, eventually becoming the only woman in the elite Polish special forces. Post-war, Zawacka was imprisoned by the communist regime and her story forgotten. Mulley's fascinating book aims to bring her extraordinary life back to global attention.
Private Revolutions, Yuan Yang
A powerful book about the realities of living in modern-day China, told through the lives of four ordinary women, each with different yet analogous struggles to thrive in an unequal society, all of whom grew up after the events of Tiananmen Square. Yang's gripping work is a true feat of storytelling, praised by judge Kavita Puri for chronicling "coming of age stories you rarely hear of".
Raising Hare, Chloe Dalton
A charming and unusual book about what happened when lockdown forced Dalton – a busy London professional – to move back to the countryside. There, she found a young abandoned baby hare and her experience raising it would prove to be life-changing. Judge Elizabeth Buchan called the work a "beautiful meditation on the interactions between the human and the natural world".
The Story of a Heart, Rachel Clarke
An immensely moving account of how one family's tragedy – the deterioration of a nine-year-old girl after a catastrophic car accident – became the saving of another, when her young heart was donated to Max, a little boy dying from a crippling virus in desperate need of a transplant. Clarke's journey to writing this book is almost as extraordinary as the story itself: she became a palliative care doctor after years as a documentarian, focusing on subjects such as the Iraq War. The Story of a Heart is her third work of non-fiction.
What the Wild Sea Can be, Helen Scales
A galvanising call to protect our oceans, written with a lyrical and evocative prose that draws on the rich and fascinating history of our seas. The marine biologist and author Helen Scales astutely balances her knowledge and narrative prowess to offer advice and innovation for protecting our seas and coastlines, making this both a riveting and urgent read.
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