Women's History Month: Wolfson History Prize

March is Women's History Month, an opportunity to raise awareness of the contributions made my women to history, society and culture. In the library we have been celebrating by showcasing books on literature, art and history by prize winning women authors.  

In this post we are focusing on The Wolfson History Prize, the most prestigious award for history writing in the U.K. This prize is granted to history books which are highly researched, well-written, and are easily readable to a broad audience. This helps promote excellence in historical research and ensures that it reaches beyond the boundaries of academia (and makes many of them enjoyable reads). 

Every year 6 works are shortlisted, and one declared a winner. In the 50 years since the award was founded, 130 different historians have been shortlisted. Here are a sample of the women whose work has been recognised by this highly respected award in the last 5 years: 

• 2024 winner: Shadows at Noon: The South Asian Twentieth Century by Joya Chatterji. This book follows themes from food and the household to nationhood and the state throughout the 1900s examining Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan, pushing back against standard narratives of the ‘inherent’ differences between them, and instead examining South Asia as a whole. 

• 2023 shortlisted Portable Magic: A History of Books and Their Readers by Emma Smith. This book details the history of books as objects that are so loved – even in the age of e-books there are still people who swear by physical books. Smith delves into the history of print, dismantling the idea that Gutenburg invented printing to the rise of the mass market of paperbacks, to explore the hold that books have over us. 

• 2022 winner: Devil-Land: England Under Siege, 1588-1688 by Clare Jackson. This engaging text details how Europe considered England from the eve of the Spanish Armada against an heirless monarch up to the ‘Glorious Revolution’ by the Dutch in the face of a floundering restored Stuart monarchy in 1688. This reinterpretation of a contentious and unstable century in English history reveals England as a ‘failed state’ by many contemporaries. 

• 2021 shortlisted: Double Lives: A History of Working Motherhood by Helen McCarthy. This work details the transition from a world that drove mothers out of the workforce a century ago to our modern world with maternity leave and mothers returning to work post-baby. McCarthy delves deep into a wealth of sources from across the country and classes to uncover the personal, cultural, and social history of working motherhood. 

• 2020 shortlisted: The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper by Hallie Rubenhold. This book centres the lives of Jack the Ripper’s victims in this narrative, giving their full stories in all their messy, living humanity before their lives were tragically cut short, and bringing them back from just being footnotes in the story of the unknown man who killed them.  

Check out these works on our displays in Harrison, Walsall, and the Hutchison libraries, and follow the link to see our IWD2025 collection online.