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Arundhati Roy longlisted for U.K. Women’s Prize
16 authors are in contention for the £30,000 prize launched in 2024 to address gender imbalance in U.K. nonfiction awards.
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Pranavi Sharma - Fri, 13, Feb 2026
- 01:29 EST
- 10
Indian author Arundhati Roy / Wikipedia, Penguin
Indian author Arundhati Roy has been longlisted for the 2026 Women’s Prize for Nonfiction, a U.K.-based award recognizing outstanding nonfiction by women.
Roy is nominated for her first memoir, ‘Mother Mary Comes to Me,’ an exploration of identity, motherhood and the making of a writer.
Roy won the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1997 for her debut novel ‘The God of Small Things,’ which became the biggest-selling book by a non-expatriate Indian author. She is also known for her political activism on human rights and environmental causes. In 2024, she received the PEN Pinter Prize from English PEN and named imprisoned British-Egyptian writer and activist Alaa Abd El-Fattah as the “Writer of Courage” with whom she chose to share the award.
ALSO READ: Indian-origin authors among 2025 Kirkus Prize Finalists
Born Nov. 24, 1961, in Shillong, now in the northeastern Indian state of Meghalaya, Roy studied architecture at the School of Planning and Architecture in New Delhi before turning to writing.
Sixteen authors are in contention for the £30,000 prize, which was launched in 2024 to address gender imbalance in U.K. nonfiction awards. Research cited by organizers found that only 35.5% of winners across seven major U.K. nonfiction prizes over the previous decade were women.
This year’s longlist spans politics, memoir, science, art, history and biography, and includes seven debut authors. Chair of judges Thangam Debbonaire, a Labour peer, called the selection “hopeful” and said it represented “women writing excellently on a wide range of subjects, each uncovering something new about our world.”
The shortlist of six titles will be announced March 25. The winner will be revealed June 11 and will receive £30,000 and a limited-edition artwork known as the Charlotte.
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