Rachel Clarke wins the Women's Prize for Non-Fiction 2025
The Story of a Heart, a doctor's account of a transplant between two children, won the second Women's Prize for Non-Fiction.
Rachel Clarke won the 2025 Women's Prize for Non-Fiction for The Story of a Heart, announced in London on 12 June 2025. It was only the second year of the prize, which is worth £30,000. The inaugural winner, in 2024, was Naomi Klein for Doppelganger.
Clarke is a British doctor. Her book follows a heart transplant between two nine-year-old children, Keira Ball and Max Johnson, and sets it against the history of transplant surgery. It is published by Little, Brown and had been shortlisted for the 2024 Baillie Gifford Prize.
The judges were chaired by the journalist Kavita Puri. The other shortlisted books were A Thousand Threads by Neneh Cherry, Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton, Agent Zo by Clare Mulley, What the Wild Sea Can Be by Helen Scales and Private Revolutions by Yuan Yang.
The non-fiction prize was set up in response to evidence that women were under-represented among winners of the major non-fiction awards. It is still young, and it is too early to say what effect it will have. For writers of narrative non-fiction, though, a winner that combines research, specialist knowledge and a strong human story is a fair model of what the form can do.
Sources: Kirkus Reviews: Winners of the 2025 Women's Prizes are revealed; Wikipedia: Women's Prize for Non-Fiction.