LONDON – Author-activist Naomi Klein won the debut Women’s Nonfiction Award on Thursday with “Doppelganger,” a personal account of his immersion in the world of online misinformation.
Its sister prize, the Women’s Prize for Fiction, went to American writer VV Ganeshananthan for her novel “Brotherless Night”, about a family torn apart by the long civil war in Sri Lanka. Both come with 30,000 pounds ($38,000) in prize money.
Both winners made reference to the cloudy international conflict situation, at a time when the arts world is struggling with divisions over the Israel-Hamas War and corporate sponsorship of the arts.
Klein, author of “No Logo” and “The Shock Doctrine”, investigates her experience of being mistaken for Naomi Wolf, author of “The Beauty Myth” and, more recently, a promoter of anti-vaxx ideas and other conspiracy theories. Part memoir and part reportage, “Doppelganger” – subtitled “A Trip into the Mirror World” – investigates how life online has distorted reality and asks what can be done about it.
Historian Suzannah Lipscomb, who headed a panel of judges for the nonfiction prize, called Klein’s book “a courageous, humane, optimistic call to arms that takes us beyond black and white, beyond right and left.”
Klein thanked the award for “not shying away from controversy.” She has backed calls for book festivals to stop taking money from companies with investments in fossil fuels or Israel’s defense sector, a campaign that has seen events in the UK cancel funding from financial firm Baillie Gifford.
Some argue this deprives the arts of much-needed funding, but Klein said he “wanted to use the platform to call for more courage from cultural institutions.”
Ganeshananthan’s victorious second novel, which traces an aspiring doctor’s journey through the brutality and moral uncertainties of war, took nearly two decades to complete. Novelist Monica Ali, who chaired the fiction judging panel, said “Brotherless Night” is “a brilliant, compelling and deeply moving novel that bears witness to the intimate and epic-scale tragedies of Sri Lanka’s civil war.”
Ganeshananthan’s first novel, “Love Marriage,” was published in 2008, and she began “Brotherless Night” in 2004. She said writing historical fiction “with care and reflection” about a traumatic conflict well kept in living memory was faithful People’s experience was “hard work.”
“It took a long time because of the chorus of people you had to talk to,” she said.
She said that in the face of conflicts like the Israel-Hamas war, “what can writing do? We hope to move people to real collective action.”
The non-fiction prize was launched this year to help redress the gender imbalance in the publishing world, where men buy more non-fiction than women – and write more award-winning non-fiction books.
Prize organizers say that in 2022, just 26.5% of non-fiction books reviewed in British newspapers were by women, and male writers dominated established non-fiction writing prizes.
The fiction and non-fiction awards are open to English-speaking women writers from any country.
The fiction prize was founded in 1996 and previous winners include Zadie Smith Tayari Jones It is Barbara Kingsolverwho won last year for “Demon Copperhead.”
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