Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction 2025: Hare-raising and other tales

Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction 2025. Six writers, who are shortlisted for the prize, tell stories that explain the past, present and future

In a desk drawer, Helen Scales has stored a small witness to the changing ocean — a thumb-sized piece of slate etched with lines on one edge and serrated on the other. The marks look like a long-lost script but are in fact fossils of animals which lived aeons ago. Scales’ What the Wild Sea Can be: The Future of the World’s Ocean is on the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction 2025 shortlist, and is as much a backstory of the ocean which also provides clues for what’s happening to oceans now. Will life in the ocean go on?

In just its second year, the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction has cast its net wide to first announce an incredible longlist of 16 books, and then a shortlist of six. It will not be easy for the jury, led by writer and broadcaster Kavita Puri, to pick the winner on June 12. They will have to choose from a marine biologist contemplating on ocean life, a leveret-human interaction for the ages, a music memoir, the moving story of a transplant, a coming-of-age tale from China, and the untold story of a World War II woman resistance fighter.

Some of the answers Scales is seeking are perhaps to be found in Chloe Dalton’s Raising Hare, in which a chance encounter with a baby hare, a leveret, changes the jet-setting foreign policy adviser’s perspective on life and the environment. During the pandemic, Dalton shifted to the family’s home in the English countryside and there she encountered a leveret in the wild, struggling to survive. She brings it home, but desperate searches on the internet throw a blank on how to make it live. Dalton slowly learns the ropes of nurturing the leveret even as realisation dawns that hares are not to be tamed. In an eloquent summation, Dalton writes: “If it is possible, as William Blake would have it, ‘to see a world in a grain of sand’, then perhaps we can see all nature in a hare: its simplicity and intricacy, fragility and glory, transience and beauty... To domesticate is to alter the nature of an animal in order to fit it into our way of life as humans. For innately wild animals such as the hare, a better way is to coexist.”

The complex web of human life is at the heart of singer Neneh Cherry’s remarkable memoir, A Thousand Threads. She had three parents — Moki, Don, Ahmadu: givers of life but all rebels, all three bound in a long and painful history. Neneh is a rebel too and has been carried through life with the same “creative channels” she was brought up in. Among the many treasures in the Sweden-born singer/songwriter’s book is an extraordinary playlist starting with John Coltrane’s ‘A Love Supreme’ and including some of her own like ‘Buffalo Stance’. Neneh’s mother Monika Marianne Karlsson, moved to Stockholm when she was 19 in the early 1960s when it was a hub of cultural innovation. She met Ahmadu Jah from Sierra Leone who had “brought with him all this extraordinary African music.” But soon after Neneh was born, Moki and Ahmadu parted ways; and Moki fell in love with musician Don Cherry. They decided to find a way to share their lives with Neneh. Thus began an unconventional childhood which also prepared the way for her musical journey, and its ebbs and highs, drugs and all.

A book that literally tugs at heartstrings is Rachel Clarke’s The Story of A Heart. Calling organ donation an act of radical generosity, the doctor writes the story of Kiera and Max. When one nine-year-old tragically dies, the parents ensure another lives with the help of their child’s heart. The resilience of women is at the heart of Yuan Yang’s Private Revolutions, the story of four women in China post the 1990s. Like Yuan, historian Clare Mulley ensures another woman will be remembered for posterity. Agent Zo is the story of a Polish World War II resistance fighter Elżbieta Zawacka, who stood up to both the Germans and Russians.

sudipta.datta@thehindu.co.in