Books on the impact of the internet and AI are finalists for the first-ever Women's Nonfiction Prize

Get Nadine White's Race Report newsletter for a fresh perspective on the week's news Get our free newsletter from The Independent's Race Correspondent Get our free newsletter from The Independent's Race Correspondent SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. The shortlisted six books for the inaugural Women’s Prize for Nonfiction, announced on Wednesday, include Canadian author-activist Naomi Klein’s “Doppleganger,” a plunge into online misinformation, and British journalist Madhumita Murgia’s “Code-Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI.” The 30,000 pound award is a sister to the 29-year-old Women’s Prize for Fiction and is open to female English-language writers from any country in any nonfiction genre. The finalists also include autobiographical works — poet Safiya Sinclair’s “How to Say Babylon: A Jamaican Memoir” and British art critic Laura Cumming’s “Thunderclap: A Memoir of Art and Life and Sudden Death.” Rounding out the list are British author Noreen Masud’s travelogue-memoir “A Flat Place,” and Harvard history professor Tiya Miles’ “All That She Carried,” a history of American enslavement told through one Black family’s keepsake. The prize was set up in response to a gender imbalance in the book world, where men buy more nonfiction than women — and write more prize-wining nonfiction books The company Nielsen Book Research found in 2019 that while women bought 59% of all the books sold in the United Kingdom, men accounted for just over half of adult nonfiction purchases. Prize organizers say that in 2022, only 26.5% of nonfiction books reviewed in Britain’s newspapers were by women, and male writers dominated established nonfiction writing prizes.