Books by Sophie Harman
“The first part looks at the way in which women’s health has been weaponized for all sorts of purposes that have nothing to do with women’s health per se. Women’s health, she shows, has often been a ping pong ball that’s batted back and forth between international aid agencies and countries that are pursuing other agendas. She argues, for example, that the government of Rwanda has used a focus on maternal health to distract attention away from other less savoury things that they’ve got up to. It’s a hard read—not in terms of the language, as it’s very clearly written—but because it challenges readers to re-evaluate policies that on the surface seem entirely beneficial.” Read more...
The Best Nonfiction Books: The 2025 British Academy Book Prize
Rebecca Earle, Historian
Interviews where books by Sophie Harman were recommended
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1
The Burning Earth: An Environmental History of the Last 500 Years
by Sunil Amrith -
2
The Baton and the Cross: Russia's Church from Pagans to Putin
by Lucy Ash -
3
The Golden Road
by William Dalrymple -
4
Africonomics: A History of Western Ignorance
by Bronwen Everill -
5
Sick of It: The Global Fight for Women's Health
by Sophie Harman -
6
Sound Tracks: A Musical Detective Story
by Graeme Lawson
The Best Nonfiction Books: The 2025 British Academy Book Prize, recommended by Rebecca Earle
The Best Nonfiction Books: The 2025 British Academy Book Prize, recommended by Rebecca Earle
To be shortlisted for the annual British Academy Book Prize, books have to be both rigorously researched and highly readable. Historian Rebecca Earle, chair of the 2025 judging panel, talks us through the books that made this year’s shortlist, from an environmental history that opens with Genghis Khan and the Mongol expansion to a ‘musical detective story’ that investigates the sounds made by our ancestors down the millennia.
