Neneh Cherry's A THOUSAND THREADS is longlisted for The Women's Prize!

We couldn’t be more thrilled to celebrate that Neneh Cherry's beautiful memoir A THOUSAND THREADS, published in October 2024 by Fern Press, has been longlisted for the 2025 Women's Prize for Non-Fiction!

A THOUSAND THREADS, which was crowned The Sunday Times' Music Book of the Year, is longlisted alongside 16 authors, 11 of whom are British, in contention for this year’s £30,000 prize, which was launched last year to redress the gender imbalance in nonfiction prizes in the UK.

The longlisted titles “boast so many different disciplines and genres”, said journalist Kavita Puri, who is this year’s judging chair. “What unites them all is the quality of the writing, the authority of the voice and the originality of their storytelling, and just the depth and incisiveness of the research.” While the selected books are “all quite different”, said Puri, themes that emerged were “power and control – how it’s used, how it’s abused”, injustice, human connections “with each other, but also the natural world” and climate change.

The shortlist of six books will be announced on 26 March, with the winner revealed on 12 June, alongside the winner of the fiction prize, which turns 30 this year.

The nonfiction prize was announced in 2023 following research which found that only 35.5% of books awarded a nonfiction prize over the prior decade were written by women, across seven UK nonfiction prizes.

Given that “female writers in the nonfiction area don’t do as well” as their male counterparts in terms of book advances and newspaper coverage, Puri sees this prize as an opportunity to “elevate brilliant female writing in a whole array of genres”. Women’s perspectives on the “most pressing” issues of the day “need to be heard”, she added. “So there is a huge need for this prize today”.

This year’s prize was open to books published in the UK between 1 April 2024 and 31 March 2025. Alongside Puri on the judging panel are the writers Leah Broad, Elizabeth Buchan, Elizabeth-Jane Burnett and Emma Gannon.

The inaugural nonfiction prize was won by Naomi Klein for her book Doppelganger.