New Delhi: Author Arundhati Roy has been shortlisted for the prestigious Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction 2026 for her memoir Mother Mary Comes to Me.
Published last year, the memoir offers an intimate window into Roy’s rocky relationship with her mother and a life shaped by dissent and the uneasy confrontations with power.
“Our shortlist shows the power and necessity of women’s writing… These books are an urgent antidote to mis- and dis-information, written with high standards of scholarship,” said Thangam Debbonaire, British politician and Chair of Judges for the 2026 prize.
Throughout the book, Roy presents her larger-than-life mother, Mary Roy, as someone who is at times implicit and at other times unmistakably present, anchoring the narrative even when she is not directly in view.
Mary, a reformer battling Syrian Christian patriarchy, mirrors Roy’s radicalisation against state power. Childhood encounters with Naxalite communism, nuclear nationalism, and caste ripple into her critiques of dams, Kashmir, and Hindutva, fusing intimate pain with political fury.
The memoir draws from Roy’s own recollections, while also questioning their certainty.
Reflecting on a painful childhood memory, she writes, “We are all a living, breathing soup of memory and imagination, and that we may not be the best arbiters of which is which.”
“Mother Mary Comes To Me by Arundhati Roy is an extraordinarily layered memoir which addresses a complex relationship between mother and daughter, living in India in quite wildly different contexts, and her activism and her continued role in challenging political systems that leave people behind. The writing is rich and reframed my own experience of being a child growing up in 90s India,” said Roma Agrawal, who is a member of the judging panel.
Also read: Why are Pakistanis angry with David Warner now? He called PSL captains ‘school kids’
Women nonfiction writers
Roy is shortlisted alongside Ece Temelkuran (Nation of Strangers), Lyse Doucet (The Finest Hotel in Kabul), Judith Mackrell (Artists, Siblings, Visionaries), Jane Rogoyska (Hotel Exile), and Daisy Fancourt (Art Cure). The six books dissect conflict, memory, migration, art, and science in what the Women’s Prize Trust calls a “timely and timeless interrogation of our world today”.
This is not Roy’s first foray into nonfiction. Alongside her novels, The God of Small Things (1997) and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017), she has built a substantial body of nonfiction work, including The Cost of Living (1999), Power Politics (2000), War Is a Peace (2001), My Seditious Heart (2019), The End of Imagination (2020), and Azadi (2020).
As women’s voices still remain unheard in publishing’s most “authoritative” spaces, the announcement of the 2026 Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction is as much literary news as it is a sobering reminder.
Research commissioned by the Women’s Prize Trust shows that a systemic gender imbalance continues to exist in nonfiction publishing. Women writers are gaining ground in areas such as popular science (rising from 11 per cent in 2023 to 22 per cent in 2025) and philosophy (from 5 per cent to 10 per cent). However, male authors still dominate fields such as business & management (93 per cent), sport (90 per cent), and politics & current affairs (82 per cent).
The winner of the 2026 Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction will be announced on 11 June.
(Edited by Prasanna Bachchhav)