Lyse Doucet first checked into Kabul’s Intercontinental Hotel on Christmas Day 1988, as Soviet troops were withdrawing from Afghanistan at the end of a decade-long occupation. She expected to stay briefly. Instead, she remained for almost a year, and the hotel became her first Afghan home.

More than three decades later, it became the subject of her first book, The Finest Hotel in Kabul, which has now won the Women’s prize for nonfiction. But while the prize recognises a remarkable work of reportage and history, the BBC’s chief international correspondent is more interested in what it might do for the country that inspired it.

“Afghanistan has largely slipped from the headlines,” Doucet says. “Perhaps this win will bring some attention to the country. None of us should be ready to accept a situation in which we live in a world where there is a country where girls cannot be educated after they’re 16, where women cannot go to university, where women are barred from so many jobs. This is something we should all be angry about.”

Afghanistan was not ever thus. After nearly four decades reporting from the country, primarily for the BBC, Doucet, 67, has watched it pass through almost every political experiment of the modern era: Soviet-backed communism, civil war, Taliban rule, western-backed democracy, and now the Taliban again.

“I was conscious that Afghanistan has a very difficult and violent history,” Doucet says. “I needed to find something that would draw people in rather than push them away. I didn’t want people to close the book and say: ‘It’s too dark. It’s too bloody.’ So a hotel was a device to tell the story in a way people could recognise.”

The Intercontinental Hotel – known simply as the Intercon – offered the perfect lens to tell a people’s history of the country. Built by the British in the late 1960s, it was once a symbol of a different Afghanistan. In the 1960s and 70s, Kabul was known as the “Paris of the east”, a vibrant hub of fashion, jazz, miniskirts and apres-ski resorts. Afghan pop star Ahmad Zahir – known as the “Elvis of Afghanistan” – performed at the hotel; Gloria Gaynor was a guest. Foreign travellers passed through on the hippy trail.

As the following decades saw immense political upheaval, the Intercon remained open. “Politics, like hotel guests, checked in and out,” Doucet writes. “As Afghanistan lurched through decades of trial and terror, laced with bright but brief beginnings, the Intercon was an unbreakable constant.”

The hotel staff who remained through those changes are at the heart of her story: Hazrat, the housekeeper who worked there from the hotel’s opening; Abida, the hotel’s first female chef; Amanullah, the engineer; and Malalai, one of the first female waiters.

“I have to pay tribute to the Afghans who helped me and spoke to me for the book, because in Afghanistan even sharing stories can have risks,” Doucet says.

Doucet began her career in journalism as a freelance reporter in west Africa for the BBC. She went on to cover conflicts across the world, eventually becoming chief international correspondent in 2012. Her book opens with the fall of Kabul in August 2021, and the disastrous American withdrawal, which remains one of the defining moments of Doucet’s career. She recalls watching the evacuation from the airport: military transport planes, helicopters and Afghans carrying only one bag as they fled.

“There was this fear at the end. People kept talking about Vietnam – that image of the people clinging to the last helicopter rising from the roof of the embassy in Saigon,” she says. “In fact, it was a hundred times worse – Afghans racing to the airport, clinging to the underbelly of planes. It’s been a really traumatising experience.”

Since returning to power, the Taliban have systematically erased women from public life through a series of draconian measures. Girls have been entirely banned from secondary education and university, women have been forced out of many workplaces and banned from public spaces, and strict adherence to the burqa is required. Last month, an official decree was passed effectively legally recognising child marriage. And just this week, a rare protest that erupted in the western city of Herat against arrests of women accused of violating hijab rules ended with two people killed, including a child.

“Five years in and it is getting worse. It is a stain on our world,” Doucet says. “But the courage of Afghan women is extraordinary.”

Doucet is also frustrated that the barriers facing Afghan women go beyond those inside the country. “There are Afghan women getting scholarships, but there are no visas now to allow Afghan women to come and study in Britain and in many other places,” she says. “They are meeting obstacles everywhere. We live very privileged lives here, and it’s not our privilege to give up on Afghans.

“People who were somebody in Afghanistan – activists, world-class journalists – find themselves having to start again from scratch,” she continues. “It’s something none of us would want to do.”

Doucet believes, though, that the world must be careful not to dismiss the achievements of the post-2001 period. “People often say: what did 20 years of international engagement achieve? Was it all for nothing? I always say it wasn’t for nothing. There were many mistakes, but that period helped create the most educated, the most connected generation in Afghan history,” she says. “When you see girls saying: ‘I want to get online, can you help me get a scholarship, can you help me get some kind of education?’ … They know their rights now.”

This month, for the first time, the EU is preparing talks with Taliban representatives in Brussels, despite concerns that engagement risks legitimising a bloody and despotic regime. Doucet is cautious about prescribing a solution.

“I’m a BBC journalist,” Doucet says. “My job is to explain, not advocate. But [some] mediators would say that it’s better to negotiate than isolate. The only change is going to have to come from within the Taliban.”

For now, there is little sign of change in the country. But Doucet is reluctant to surrender the quality Afghans themselves prize above all others.

“Afghans always used to say: the last to die is hope,” she says. “Afghanistan has possibly lived through every political system the world has tried – the thread through Afghan history is that nothing lasts for ever.”

Debut novelist Virginia Evans has won this year’s Women’s prize for fiction, while the BBC’s chief international correspondent Lyse Doucet took home the nonfiction award, also for her debut.

Evans’s The Correspondent and Doucet’s The Finest Hotel in Kabul were announced as the winners at a ceremony in central London on Thursday evening, with each author awarded £30,000.

Julia Gillard, former Australian prime minister and chair of judges for the fiction award, described The Correspondent as “a remarkable novel, with an exemplary combination of originality, excellence and accessibility”, adding that it “captured our hearts, and should be read and savoured by all”.

Composed of letters to friends, family and authors, The Correspondent follows the irascible 73-year-old Sybil Van Antwerp’s connection to her loved ones and the written word. As Sybil loses her sight, she uses letters to confront some of the unresolved parts of her life and relationships.

Rebecca Wait, reviewing the novel for the Guardian, called it “skilful and moving”, describing it as “a paean to the art of correspondence” and “an immensely enjoyable read”. A film adaptation is in production, starring Oscar-winning actor Jane Fonda.

Canadian journalist Doucet puts the Intercontinental Hotel in Kabul at the centre of her “people’s history” of modern Afghanistan. She charts the lives of the people who pass through the hotel, where she stayed while reporting from the country as a foreign correspondent, against a backdrop of decades of war and political upheaval.

William Dalrymple, reviewing the book for the Guardian, described it as “witty, observant and sometimes heartbreaking”, adding that Doucet “succeeds in making the hotel an oddly successful frame for a sweeping social history of Afghanistan over the last half century”.

Thangam Debbonaire, former Labour MP and nonfiction chair of judges, described the book as “a perfect work of narrative nonfiction … cleverly constructed and brilliantly researched”, adding that “it will move you to tears or make you laugh, or perhaps both”.

This year’s fiction shortlist also featured Flashlight by Susan Choi, Dominion by Addie E Citchens, The Mercy Step by Marcia Hutchinson, Kingfisher by Rozie Kelly and Heart the Lover by Lily King.

Alongside Doucet’s winning book, the nonfiction shortlist included Art Cure by Daisy Fancourt, Artists, Siblings, Visionaries by Judith Mackrell, Hotel Exile by Jane Rogoyska, Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy and Nation of Strangers by Ece Temelkuran.

The creation of the Women’s prize for nonfiction in 2023 was prompted by research that found only 35.5% of winners across seven major UK nonfiction awards over the previous decade were women.

Last year’s prize for fiction went to another debut novelist, Yael van der Wouden, for The Safekeep, while the nonfiction award went to Rachel Clarke for The Story of a Heart. Past winners of the fiction prize include Zadie Smith, Ali Smith and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

Gillard was joined on the fiction judging panel by poet and novelist Mona Arshi, writer and presenter Salma El-Wardany, actor and comedian Cariad Lloyd and author and DJ Annie Macmanus.

Debbonaire’s nonfiction judging panel included Roma Agrawal, engineer and author; Nicola Elliott, founder of Neom Wellbeing; Nina Stibbe, novelist and memoirist; and Nicola Williams, crown court judge and thriller author.

A new report has found that the number of banned non-fiction books doubled during the 2024-2025 school year in the US.

PEN America analysed the 3,743 unique titles removed from school libraries and classrooms in the July to June period and found that over 1,100 or 29% were non-fiction, more than double the year prior.

The most common theme in the banned non-fiction books was activism and social movements. “These titles help students learn about their rights and the stories of those who confronted injustice and participated in social movements to change the world around them,” said McKenna Samson, a co-author of the report.

Banned non-fiction titles included Challenges for LGBTQ+ Teens by Martha Lundin, Aztec, Inca, and Maya by Elizabeth Baquedano and Night by Elie Wiesel, a Nazi death camp memoir.

“This latest trend shows an embrace of anti-intellectualism, undermining public knowledge by devaluing education and expertise,” said Kasey Meehan, director of PEN America’s freedom to read program. “It is another example of how censorship sweeps broadly, leading to removals of all kinds of books, in its efforts to sow fear and distrust in our public education system.”

The year also saw double the percentage of books about sex education being banned, including titles such as You Know, Sex: Bodies, Gender, Puberty and Other Things by Cory Silverberg.

Findings also showed high figures for marginalised communities with LGBTQ+ characters (39%) and people of colour (44%) continuing to be over-represented in the books being targeted.

Books about death and grief made up 48% of titles while those about empowerment and self-esteem made up 39%.

Fiction titles at risk in the past year included dystopian dramas such as Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury and The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins and other books including To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee and Push by Sapphire.

Since PEN America started documenting book bans in 2021, there have been more than 23,000 instances on record.

A report from the National Assessment of Educational Progress last year showed that a third of 12th-graders who had been federally tested did not have basic reading skills. Scores were the worst they had been for three decades.

The report arrives after findings from the American Library Association which shows that books banned in all US libraries saw a record high in 2025. Similarly, 40% of the titles challenged involved representations of LGBTQ+ people or people of colour.

Arundhati Roy, Lyse Doucet and Judith Mackrell are among the writers shortlisted for this year’s Women’s prize for nonfiction.

Jane Rogoyska, Ece Temelkuran and Daisy Fancourt are also in contention for the £30,000 prize, launched in 2024 to address the persistent gender imbalance in UK nonfiction prize winners.

Booker prize-winning novelist and political activist Roy has been chosen for her memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me, an exploration of identity, motherhood and the making of a writer, which Amit Chaudhuri described as “utterly absorbing” in his Guardian review.

BBC chief international correspondent Doucet is recognised for The Finest Hotel in Kabul, a people’s history of Afghanistan told through the shifting fortunes of the InterContinental hotel in the capital, praised in the Guardian as “witty, observant and sometimes heartbreaking”.

Along a similar theme, Rogoyska’s Hotel Exile looks at the history of the Hotel Lutetia in Paris, which was used as the headquarters of the German military intelligence service, the Abwehr, during the second world war.

The Women’s prize announced the shortlist alongside new data on gender imbalances in the nonfiction market. Although female authors are increasing market share in what the prize calls “authoritative” genres – including popular science (rising from 11% in 2023 to 22% in 2025) and philosophy (from 5% to 10%) – men continue to dominate most categories, including business and management (93%), sport (90%) and politics (82%).

Thangam Debbonaire, chair of judges, said the shortlist showcased “six exceptional books and six hugely talented writers, and offers readers collectively a timely and timeless interrogation of our world today”.

“These books are an urgent antidote to mis- and disinformation, written with high standards of scholarship. They offer rich and original insights in what often feels like a fragmented and uncertain world,” she added.

Mackrell’s Artists, Siblings, Visionaries is a dual biography of prominent British sibling artists Gwen and Augustus John, commended for its “novelistic sensibility” in the Guardian.

Also on the shortlist is Temelkuran for her book Nation of Strangers, on exile, migration and belonging, and the illusion of geopolitical and global stability. Rounding off the list is Fancourt’s Art Cure, about how the arts can improve our health, wellbeing and longevity.

The creation of the prize was prompted by research which found that only 35.5% of winners across seven major UK nonfiction awards over the previous decade were women.

Along with the six shortlisted books, titles longlisted for this year’s prize were Daughters of the Bamboo Grove by Barbara Demick; Don’t Let It Break You, Honey by Jenny Evans; With the Law on Our Side by Lady Hale; To Be Young, Gifted and Black by Kadiatu Kanneh-Mason; Ask Me How It Works: Love in an Open Marriage by Deepa Paul; Death of an Ordinary Man by Sarah Perry; The Genius of Trees by Harriet Rix; Finding Albion by Zakia Sewell; To Exist As I Am by Grace Spence Green; and Indignity: A Life Reimagined by Lea Ypi.

Last year’s prize went to Dr Rachel Clarke for The Story of a Heart, while the inaugural winner was Naomi Klein for Doppelganger. The winner will be revealed alongside the winner of the Women’s prize for fiction on 11 June. The winning author will receive £30,000 and a limited-edition artwork known as the Charlotte.

Alongside Debbonaire, the judging panel includes Roma Agrawal, engineer, author and broadcaster; Nicola Elliott, founder of Neom Wellbeing; Nina Stibbe, novelist and memoirist; and Nicola Williams, crown court judge and thriller author.

• To browse all books in the 2026 Women’s prize for nonfiction shortlist, visit guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

While watching University Challenge or Only Connect, the impulse to shout out the answers comes down to a simple “human urge”, says publisher Richard Green.

That compulsion to “know useless trivia or show off knowledge” has been noticed by the publishing industry, which has met the desire by coming up with a range of products that resulted in quiz and trivia books having a bumper year in 2025, the best since records began in 1998.

The category saw a 24% increase in sales value compared with 2024, according to figures from NielsenIQ BookData. Puzzles sales volume, meanwhile, is up 91% since 2019. This comes amid a broader decline in nonfiction sales, which fell to their lowest level since 2014, representing a 6% year on year decrease.

Publishers suggest that part of the appetite for quizzes and puzzles is a sign of the times. It’s “good old-fashioned escapism” from a “relentless” news cycle, says Green, who at Quarto publishes titles including Wordle Challenge, one of the top sellers in the category last year, based on the New York Times game.

In challenging times, solving problems in the form of puzzles is “fun and therapeutic”, says Stephanie Duncan, editorial director at Transworld, publisher of The 1% Club Quiz Book, which topped the quiz category last year, selling 166,000 copies (a second book sold 106,000, with a third due in November).

Buyers are also looking for an “alternative to screen time”, says Tim Clare, author of books including The Game Changers. There is something to be said for “single-serving” media, he says, as you can’t check your work email or social media via a physical book.

Part of the spike may trace back to the “unparalleled growth” of the board game industry during lockdown, he adds. Many people also got into sudoku, jigsaws and cryptic crosswords during that time. And then came the book Murdle, a popular murder mystery logic puzzle, published in 2023, which continues to be a “big mover” in the space. It sold 115,000 copies last year alone, not counting the sales of its many iterations.

Beyond consumer taste for quizzes and puzzles, there has also simply been “people willing to write them, and writing good ones”, says Clare.

Meanwhile, Waterstones has “completely changed” how it thinks about games over the past six years, according to Clare. There is a growing understanding of the “huge crossover” between readers and gamers. “You are leaving money on the table as a book retailer if you don’t cater to that audience with books that either are about games or include games.”

Social media has also helped make games, such as cryptic crosswords, more accessible, with explainer channels breaking down challenging clues so that cryptics are no longer “this ivory tower impenetrable sort of shadow magic”.

Many quiz and game books are spin-offs from hugely popular podcasts and shows, including The Rest Is Quiz and The Official Race Across the World Puzzle Book. “People want to be more engaged with formats these days, rather than being a passive viewer,” says David Bodycombe, producer of Lateral with Tom Scott, which also has an accompanying book.

Nonfiction sales did not fare well last year, with a 5% fall in sales value compared with 2024. “It’s a real struggle, the market’s difficult,” says Green, who publishes narrative nonfiction along with quiz books. However, “it’s not necessarily all doom and gloom, it’s all part of the publishing cycle”.

Reader demand for true stories “remains as strong as ever”, says Sara Cywinski, nonfiction publisher at Pan, which published The Rest Is Quiz book. Duncan agrees: Transworld is apparently not seeing a decline in nonfiction, and she points to a number of recent bestsellers – Nobody’s Girl by Virginia Giuffre, A Hymn to Life by Gisèle Pelicot and Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams.

However, Cywinski says that our habits are changing. “While physical nonfiction books have seen a dip in sales, the audio format is surging, largely because it can fit more easily into people’s lives.” She points to the “massive success” of the audiobook version of Careless People, Wynn-Williams’ whistleblowing account of her time at Facebook.

Now that many essayists and journalists are publishing directly to subscribers on Substack, work that might have been released as a book is coming out serially, explains Clare. YouTube video essays and podcasts are also popular alternative platforms. “I don’t think these are bad forms of media,” he says, “but my heart is in the nonfiction book.”

If the question is which genre bucked the prevailing trend in publishing to record a remarkable rise in readership last year, the answer is clear: quiz books.

Spending on the titles increased by nearly a quarter in 2025, data from NielsenIQ BookData suggests. It was the best year for quiz books since records began in 1998, according to the company, which manages the ISBN and SAN agencies for the UK and Ireland.

There was also a sharp increase in spending on Bibles, with sales up by 19% on the previous year. Industry research found total sales of Bibles in the UK reached £6.3m, an increase of £3.6m on 2019 sales.

The bestselling quiz books by Waterstones and Amazon are spin-offs of The 1% Club gameshow, broadcast on ITV and hosted by Lee Mack. They are published by Transworld, a division of Penguin Random House.

However, spending on non-fiction slumped to its lowest level since 2014, at £791m, a 5% fall. A total of 59m books were sold, a 6% decrease year-on-year.

Spending on adult fiction rose, though the number of print fiction books sold dropped slightly by 0.5%.

Combined print book sales were worth £1.81bn. The data was published before the London Book Fair, the publishers’ trade fair, which starts on Tuesday.

Philip Stone, the head of publisher account management at NeilsenIQ BookData, said: “NielsenIQ BookData’s 2025 findings reveal a resilient book market, with readers continuing to invest in stories despite a softer year overall.

“Fiction remained the standout performer, fuelled by strong growth in sci‑fi and fantasy, horror and graphic novels, while children’s and young adult books also saw encouraging gains in key areas.

“Non‑fiction faced greater pressure, though the popularity of trivia, quiz books and religious titles highlights sustained demand for escapism and insight.”

The average cost of a book has hit record levels. It stands at £9.52, 2% higher than 2024. The increase was attributed to inflation and the rising cost of book production.

Audiobook sales also rose, as did comic strips and graphic novels.

The quizshow host turned fiction writer and podcaster Richard Osman’s latest instalment in the Thursday Murder Club series, The Impossible Fortune, topped NielsenIQ’s 2025 bestsellers list.

It sold 478,000 copies, according to the data, ahead of Charlie Mackesy’s Always Remember and Freida McFadden’s The Housemaid.

Children’s author Julia Donaldson, best known for The Gruffalo, was the UK’s bestselling author, with 3.3m copies bought.

McFadden, who sold 2.6m copies, had The Housemaid adapted for a film starring Sydney Sweeney, which was released in December.

In third place was Dav Pilkey, the author of the Captain Underpants children’s series, who sold 1.5m.

Stone added: “With bestselling authors such as Richard Osman, Freida McFadden, Julia Donaldson and Dav Pilkey leading another solid year, publishers, booksellers and authors continue to keep the market energised, innovative and full of opportunity.

“The momentum feels especially fitting as we enter the National Year Of Reading and work to inspire more people across the UK to make reading a regular part of their lives.”

Arundhati Roy, Sarah Perry and Lea Ypi are among the writers longlisted for this year’s Women’s prize for nonfiction.

Sixteen authors are in contention to win the £30,000 award, launched in 2024 to address the persistent gender imbalance in UK nonfiction prize winners.

The 2026 longlist spans politics, memoir, science, art, history and biography, and includes seven debut authors. Chair of judges and Labour peer Thangam Debbonaire said the longlist was “hopeful”, and represented “women writing excellently on a wide range of subjects, each uncovering something new about our world”.

Among the best-known names on the list is the Booker prize-winning novelist and political activist Arundhati Roy, longlisted for her first memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me, an exploration of identity, motherhood and the making of a writer, which Amit Chaudhuri described as “utterly absorbing” in a Guardian review.

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Women’s prize for nonfiction longlist 2026

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British author Sarah Perry’s Death of an Ordinary Man, a meditation on grief, family and faith, centred on the death of her father-in-law, is also longlisted. Writing in the Guardian, Joe Moran called it “gem-like” and “special”, a book that “works its magic through the adamantine detail and quiet lyricism”.

The academic and author Lea Ypi is nominated for Indignity: A Life Reimagined, which examines her personal family history alongside political upheaval across the Balkans, from the Ottoman empire to the aftermath of communism – a history “brought to life through Ypi’s novelistic style”, Sami Kent wrote in his Guardian review.

History and politics loom large on the list – the BBC’s chief international correspondent Lyse Doucet is recognised for The Finest Hotel in Kabul, a people’s history of Afghanistan told through the shifting fortunes of the InterContinental hotel in the capital. Barbara Demick’s Daughters of the Bamboo Grove tells the true story of separated twins to illuminate the human consequences of China’s one-child policy, while Jane Rogoyska’s Hotel Exile looks at the history of the Hotel Lutetia in Paris, which was used as the headquarters of the German military intelligence service, the Abwehr, during the second world war.

Contemporary social and cultural questions are tackled in works including Lady Hale’s With the Law on Our Side, an insider’s account of how the legal system works and how it may be improved; Zakia Sewell’s Finding Albion, exploring British myth and folklore; and Ece Temelkuran’s Nation of Strangers, on exile, migration and belonging. The longlist also includes books on art and science, from Daisy Fancourt’s Art Cure, on the health benefits of creativity, to Harriet Rix’s The Genius of Trees, a study of how trees have shaped ecosystems and human history.

Other longlisted titles include Jenny Evans’s memoir Don’t Let It Break You, Honey, her account of being assaulted by a high-profile figure; Kadiatu Kanneh-Mason’s To Be Young, Gifted and Black, exploring creativity and race in the 21st century; Judith Mackrell’s Artists, Siblings, Visionaries, a dual biography of Gwen and Augustus John; Deepa Paul’s Ask Me How It Works, an exploration of love and desire in an open marriage; and Grace Spence Green’s To Exist As I Am, a doctor’s reflections on a life-changing spinal injury.

Debbonaire said: “The books on this hopeful longlist are rigorous and researched, lyrical and flowing. They are drawn together by the originality and skill with which they have been written. This reading list carries relevance and truth for the future as well as holding significant value for the present day.”

Claire Shanahan, executive director of the Women’s Prize Trust, said the longlist reflected the importance of hearing a variety of voices. “Reading and hearing a multiplicity of perspectives, experiences and ideas through nonfiction writing is more vital than ever – it is how we make sense of the world, it’s how we learn from the past, challenge injustice, and imagine new futures,” she said.

The creation of the prize was prompted by research which found that only 35.5% of winners across seven major UK nonfiction awards over the previous decade were women.

Last year’s prize went to Dr Rachel Clarke for The Story of a Heart, while the inaugural winner was Naomi Klein for Doppelganger.

The judges will announce a shortlist of six titles on 25 March, with the winner revealed on 11 June. The winning author will receive £30,000 and a limited-edition artwork known as the Charlotte.

Alongside Debbonaire, the judging panel includes Roma Agrawal, engineer, author and broadcaster, Nicola Elliott, founder of NEOM Wellbeing, Nina Stibbe, novelist and memoirist, and Nicola Williams, crown court judge and thriller author.

• To browse all books on the Women’s prize for nonfiction 2026 longlist, visit guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

In the decade leading up to the pandemic, nonfiction seemed unstoppable. Readers flocked to books that explained a world upended by Brexit, Trump, #MeToo and climate upheaval. Titles such as Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny, Caroline Criado-Perez’s Invisible Women, and Robin D’Angelo’s White Fragility soared up the charts. It felt as though reading itself was part of the civic response, a way to understand what was happening, and perhaps influence what might happen next.

Fast forward to the present day, and the picture is starting to look different: a recent report from NielsenIQ found that trade nonfiction sales have slipped sharply. In volume terms, the category is down 8.4% between last summer and the same period this year – nearly double the decline in paperback fiction – and down 4.7% in value. Though there have been some exceptions, such Chloe Dalton’s Raising Hare and Want by Gillian Anderson, 14 out of 18 nonfiction subcategories have contracted.

Anecdotally, authors are feeling the pinch. After receiving a slew of rejections for a nonfiction proposal, one writer told me the feedback from publishers was that “nonfiction just isn’t selling”. Another has pivoted from nonfiction to fiction on her agent’s advice because “it’s hell out there”. A third told me that he’d heard publishers have soured on any nonfiction that isn’t “Hollywood friendly” – ie made-for-TV memoirs.

Speaking to publishing insiders and readers, one word that cropped up repeatedly was escapism. The world is exhausting, so readers are seeking refuge rather than clarity. Some are disillusioned; the voracious reading of the past decade didn’t transform the world as many hoped. “I think there is definitely a sense of fatigue,” says Holly Harley, head of nonfiction at publisher Head of Zeus. “The news is terrible. People feel overloaded. That escapism is why we’re seeing such a rise in romantasy.”

Emily Ash Powell, journalist and host of a writing club, agrees. “Things feel so bleak right now in our own lives that people want to escape a little bit and borrow the lives of others,” she says. For Harley, this is also where the legacy of 2020 cuts sharply. “It’s awful, but a lot of the trend-led interest in social justice has fallen away,” she says.

In the months following the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement, the UK saw a 56% rise in sales of books by writers of colour in the year to 2021, and Reni Eddo-Lodge became the first Black British author to top the UK nonfiction chart. But that momentum stalled – in fact, a later analysis by The Bookseller found the post-BLM boom “failed to result in the promised broadening of publishing’s output”.

“I used to work at the publisher who published How to Argue With a Racist,” Adam Rutherford’s 2020 book, Harley says. “It had this vertiginous rise – and then it dropped off. You wouldn’t expect that for a bestseller.”

According to some authors, though, the problem is not one of demand but supply: are we simply publishing less high-quality nonfiction?

The industry “has become so risk-averse that everything they publish is boring,” one novelist, who wished to remain anonymous, tells me. “I read old nonfiction – narrative-driven, proper essay collections. But almost all new stuff is pop politics or this really jargon-heavy writing on niche topics – the history of resistance through food, or whatever. Like, who’s talking about that in the pub?”

Another author says part of the problem is too many books being commissioned because of follower counts rather than ideas. “A lot of the nonfiction being commissioned at the moment is essentially people capitalising on those with large followings,” she says. “It feels very Instagram-coded. Did this need to be a book? Or could it have been a caption?”

Nonfiction is increasingly competing with a glut of free – and often excellent – information elsewhere. Online video essays dissect politics and psychology in 20 minutes, while The Rest Is … behemoth has turned public intellectualism into bite-size chunks of entertainment. Why spend £15 on a book about one issue when a few podcasts can explain it on your commute? It’s certainly a hard sell for nonfiction publishers.

“Podcasts are in direct competition with nonfiction,” Harley admits. “Publishers have to be more agile.”

Powell agrees. “We’re so overloaded with content that [other media] almost ticks the box of nonfiction learning,” she says. “People feel they can get the same insight without wading through a book.”

The shift to audio, however, doesn’t necessarily mean an abandonment of nonfiction books. Audiobook sales have boomed; the share of nonfiction purchases in audio versus other formats has nearly doubled in five years, with 25- to 44-year-olds driving the trend. “Some authors now do four or five times their physical sales in audio,” says Harley.

Caroline Sanderson, a veteran nonfiction editor, adds a note of nuance. “There has long been an ecosystem going on here where these things support one another,” she says. “So the popularity of The Rest Is History podcast, for example, undoubtedly boosts sales of Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland’s nonfiction. Ditto Rory Stewart with The Rest Is Politics.”

It’s important to remember, too, what Harley describes as the “feast and famine” nature of publishing. “Since the pandemic, there haven’t been any runaway bestsellers that have led a group or subject class to spring up.” In contrast, past big sellers have included the likes of Bill Bryson with A Short History of Nearly Everything, and Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens, the blockbuster success of which helped define nonfiction markets in the 00s and 2010s.

And indeed, some subgenres seem to be holding their ground, or even growing. Biography and autobiography remain powerful, as do health, pop psychology and “smart thinking” titles, such as this year’s hit from Mel Robbins, The Let Them Theory.

The surge in self-help and personal development titles suggests a broader cultural shift: as interest in political or social justice books cools, readers increasingly reach for personal betterment instead.

For Sanderson, the biggest mistake is assuming nonfiction is a single organism. “The success of one book can change the whole picture. Nobody talked about the decline of nonfiction the year Prince Harry’s Spare was published.”

Harley concurs. “There are a few years in the last 20 where you get double-digit growth, and every time it’s because of one or two massive books. The drop-off between those blockbusters and what we call the mid-list is more stark now. Books either blow the doors off – or they sell weakly.”

What troubles Sanderson isn’t the sales cycle but the long game – as books increasingly come under fire with bans in the US and rising political pressures on education and libraries worldwide, the importance of defending rigorous, long-form nonfiction as a tool for critical thinking has never been clearer. “Regardless of sales, I hold passionately to the importance of long-form nonfiction in helping us understand the world,” she says. “We need it. Sales fluctuations are the weather; it’s the climate we need to worry about.”

Australian author Helen Garner has been named the winner of the 2025 Baillie Gifford prize for nonfiction for How to End a Story, becoming the first writer to win the prestigious award with a collection of diaries.

The announcement of the £50,000 award was made on Tuesday evening at a ceremony in London. Robbie Millen, chair of judges and the literary editor of the Times, described Garner’s collection as “a remarkable, addictive book,” and said the decision had been unanimous among the six judges. “Garner takes the diary form – mixing the intimate, the intellectual, and the everyday – to new heights.”

The Baillie Gifford is widely regarded as the UK’s most prestigious prize for nonfiction. It is the first major literary award Garner has won in the UK, though she is one of Australia’s most celebrated authors, where her honours include the 2023 Australian Society of Authors medal, the 2019 Australia Council award for lifetime achievement in literature, and the 2006 Melbourne prize for literature. She also won the 2016 Windham-Campbell literature prize administered by Yale University.

Garner, 82, has long been recognised for her sharp-eyed, often uncompromising examinations of domestic life, creativity and morality. Born in Geelong, southern Australia, in 1942, she worked as a high school teacher and journalist before publishing her debut novel, Monkey Grip, in 1977. She has since written fiction, screenplays and nonfiction, including The Children’s Bach and This House of Grief.

How to End a Story collects decades of Garner’s diaries, tracing her life from bohemian Melbourne in the 1970s through an intense love affair in the 1980s to the breakdown of her marriage in the 1990s. The entries are characterised by what the judges called “devastating honesty, steel-sharp wit and an ecstatic attention to the details of everyday life.”

Millen praised the breadth and humanity of the diaries, which run to 832 pages. “It’s a big book,” he said, “but Garner is such good company – funny, original, clever, self-lacerating, always interesting – that we didn’t want the story to end.”

How to End a Story was published to widespread critical acclaim. Rachel Cooke in the Observer called the diaries “the greatest, richest journals by a writer since Virginia Woolf’s.”

Garner’s next work of nonfiction, The Mushroom Tapes: Conversations on a Triple Murder Trial, co-authored with Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein, will be published in the UK on 20 November, based on the infamous Erin Patterson mushroom murder trial.

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Baillie Gifford, the Edinburgh-based investment management firm that has sponsored the prize since 2016, has come under fire in recent years because of its investments in fossil fuels and companies with links to Israel. Last year, boycotts of literary festivals it had sponsored, organised by the campaign group Fossil Free Books, led to the termination of partnerships between Baillie Gifford and nine festivals.

Last year’s winner, Australian author Richard Flanagan, said he would not accept the £50,000 prize money until the fund manager shared a plan to reduce its investments in fossil fuel extraction and increase investments in renewables. At a press conference held to announce the shortlist, prize director Toby Mundy said that Flanagan had had a “candid” conversation with the fund manager, but the ultimate result was that the author did not accept the money and it will instead be donated to a literacy charity.

Alongside Garner’s, the other titles shortlisted this year were The Revolutionists by Jason Burke, The Boundless Deep by Richard Holmes, Captives and Companions by Justin Marozzi, Lone Wolf by Adam Weymouth, and Electric Spark: The Enigma of Muriel Spark by Frances Wilson.

The Baillie Gifford was originally founded as the Samuel Johnson prize in 1999. Past winners include Antony Beevor, Jonathan Coe, Serhii Plokhy, Hallie Rubenhold and Katherine Rundell.

This year’s judging panel comprised Millen, historian Pratinav Anil, journalist and broadcaster Inaya Folarin Iman, author and previous Baillie Gifford winner Lucy Hughes-Hallett, the Economist’s deputy culture editor Rachel Lloyd, and author and biographer Peter Parker. The panel selected the winner from more than 350 books published between November 2024 and October 2025.

• To order How to End a Story and browse the shortlist, visit guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.