Strange but true: women dominate the long list for £30,000 non-fiction prize

Rock gardening, sex advice and an account of lost virginity in Venetian convents are among the subjects on the long list for the BBC Four Samuel Johnson prize for non-fiction.

The list of 18 nominated authors contains a record 11 women writers.

Among the titles highlighted by Rosie Boycott, chairing the judges, is an account of "the varieties of reproduction in the natural world written as letters from an agony aunt". Olivia Judson's Dr Tatiana's Sex Guide to All Creation: The Definitive Guide to the Evolutionary Biology of Sex is published by Chatto & Windus. The book is narrated through an agony aunt who answers queries from organisms including green spoon worms, hyenas and slime moulds on their concerns about the behaviour of their lovers.

Ms Judson is a research fellow at the Imperial College in London who received a doctorate in biological sciences from Oxford University and later wrote on science for The Economist.

Ms Boycott also cited Nicola Shulman's A Rage for Rock Gardening: The Story of Reginald Farrer, Gardener, Writer and Plant Collector, as evidence of the diversity of the list. Shulman's work tells the story of an extraordinary Edwardian plant collector who was born short "almost to dwarfishness" with a harelip and a cleft palate, the treatment of which rendered his speech almost unintelligible.

Mary Laven's Virgins of Venice: Enclosed Lives and Broken Vows in the Renaissance Convent, describes the lives of some of the unmarried women from the upper ranks of Venetian society who were dumped into the 50 convents that existed in the city in the 16th century.

The historian Peter Ackroyd is also on the list for Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination.

Ackroyd, a biographer of Charles Dickens and William Blake but best-known for his London chronicles, attempts to pin down the English national character.

Ms Boycott, a former editor of The Independent, said: "Coming up with the long list was a reasonably easy process, but bringing it down to a shortlist and finally finding a winner will, I suspect, be very hard."

The other judges on the panel are the Conservative MP and former cabinet minister Michael Portillo, the historian Andrew Roberts, Tim Radford, the science editor of The Guardian, and Fiammetta Rocco, the literary editor of The Economist.

The shortlist will be announced at Samuel Johnson's House in London on Tuesday, 29 April and the winner of the £30,000 prize will be announced in June.

Establishment choices

Potential prize-winners: 'White Mughals'; 'The Devil that Danced on the Water'; 'Sex Advice to All Creation' and 'Samuel Pepys, the Unequalled Self'

Which non-fiction books created a genuine buzz of curiosity, excitement and debate between May 2002 and this spring?

There was Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks's brave effort to leap across the barriers of faith, The Dignity of Difference; Eric Hobsbawm's magisterial memoir of his life as historian and activist, Interesting Times; and Martin Amis's highly subjective encounter with Stalin's crimes, Koba the Dread.

Now, what do these works, which engaged and delighted (or sometimes outraged) legions of readers, have in common? Not one appears on the long list for this year's Samuel Johnson prize.

Since its inception five years ago, the £30,000 prize has rewarded excellent books. But it quickly revealed a tendency to act as a safe, Establishment honour for safe, Establishment people. The judges this time included the right-wing politician Michael Portillo and the right-wing historian Andrew Roberts. The panel's skewed and limited choices are a bit of a giveaway.

Mainstream history and biography benefits to the detriment of politics, philosophy and science. In the ever-fertile field of genetic studies, for example, the judges choose Olivia Judson's entertaining but gimmicky Sex Advice to All Creation but overlook major and accessible works such as Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate.

Thankfully, plenty of superb books have survived to the long list. Potential prize-winners include William Dalrymple's excavations of cross-cultural passions under the Raj, White Mughals; Aminatta Forna's searing memoir of family and politics in Sierra Leone, The Devil that Danced on the Water; and Claire Tomalin's Whitbread Book of the Year victor, Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self.

Samuel Johnson himself never shirked controversy and never flattered vested interests. The prize named in his honour stands in danger of looking as if it does both.

Boyd Tonkin