International Women’s Day Reading List: 7 Powerful Feminist Books on Women’s Rights, Resistance and Equality
International Women’s Day (8th March) is a moment to celebrate progress, but also to acknowledge how far there still is to go. Across the world, women continue to fight for autonomy, safety, creative freedom and equality.
We pulled together a range of books, fiction and non-fiction, classics and contemporary voices, each confronting the realities women face and the courage it takes to challenge them. These are not always easy or comfortable reads but they are urgent, powerful and necessary.
For the Sun After Long Nights: The Story of Iran’s Women-led Uprising – Nilo Tabrizy, Fatemeh Jamalpour
Longlisted for the 2026 National Book Award for Non-Fiction
Having been arrested and beaten for not wearing her hijab properly, Mahsa Jîna Amini’s death in police custody in 2022 encouraged thousands of Iranians into the streets for one of the largest uprisings in decades, known as the Woman, Life, Freedom movement.
Journalists Jamalpour and Trabrizy, writing in Iran and New York respectively, document through their correspondence their investigations into the protest against the regime, asking what is at risk for those who express themselves in an oppressive setting?
Blending reportage with political history, For the Sun After Long Nights offers an insightful, essential testament to the courage of Iranian women, protestors and journalists in the face of oppression and a refusal to stay silent.
The New Age of Sexism – Laura Bates
Whilst we might like to believe that technological advances are paving the way to gender equality, author and activist Laura Bates invites us to explore the ugly underbelly of misogyny in emerging technologies.
From the internal bias of artificial intelligence to the concerning prevalence of sex robots and the alarming dynamics of the metaverse, The New Age of Sexism uncovers the rapidly growing threat of technology to women.
Seemingly dystopian and yet wholly true, Bates urgently addresses a uniquely modern pursuit for feminism.
Sad Tiger – Neige Sinno
How do you write about the unspeakable?
Having survived the trauma perpetrated by her stepfather, the subsequent public trial and relocating to Mexico, Sad Tiger emerges as Sinno’s fragmentary and investigatory masterpiece, weaving together close readings of the likes of Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, Virginie Despentes and William Blake.
Sinno’s striking memoir examines what it means to break silence, and whether language can ever fully contain experience.
The Eyes Are the Best Part – Monika Kim
From a Korean rising star making waves around the globe, The Eyes Are the Best Part is a delicious feminist psychological horror about the making of a female serial killer from a Korean-American perspective. Kim's novel imagines what happens when women are pushed to seek revenge instead of equality, a brilliantly inventive, subversive novel with unflinching rage at its core.
When Ji-won’s family is left ruptured in the wake of her father’s affair, the arrival of her mother’s new white boyfriend could not have come at a worse time. Increasingly obsessed with his piercing blue eyes, Ji-won’s grasp on reality begins to wane, and she resolves to curb her all-consuming cravings before it’s too late.
Happening – Annie Ernaux
Annie Ernaux, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2022, is best known for her works of fiction and her raw, compelling memoirs.
At just 80 pages, Happening is as poignant as it is short. Ernaux realised she was pregnant in 1963 at the age of 23, twelve years before abortion was legalised in France. Unmarried and wanting to avoid the label of ‘social failure’ for herself and her family, Ernaux decides she cannot go through with the pregnancy and resolves to self-administer the abortion.
Happening holds a mirror up to the dangers of denying women autonomy over their own bodies. Ernaux’s memories and diary entries from the time provide the narrative, etching a clear, clean story of her experience, leaving readers only with the cold, hard truth to face.
The Queens of Sarmiento Park – Camila Sosa Villada
Translated from Spanish, The Queens of Sarmiento Park is an Argentine literary sensation dwelling on violence, exclusion and love. Villada’s memorable characters, vicious realism and elements of fairytale meet with the intersection of hope, prejudice and fear.
Strikingly imaginative, heart-wrenchingly devastating and darkly funny, The Queens of Sarmiento Park is a queer story of chosen family, gender identity, sex work and the dismantling of the nuclear family as we know it, an ode to the practice of love and care on the periphery of society.
A Room of One’s Own – Virginia Woolf
A Room of One’s Own hardly needs an introduction as one of the most revered and celebrated works of feminist literature and theory. Originally a speech given to the female students at Newnham and Girton College at the University of Cambridge, A Room of One’s Own was later adapted into written form for all to enjoy.
Opening with the iconic line, 'But, you may say, we asked you to speak about women and fiction - what has that got to do with a room of one's own?', Woolf argues for the necessity of space, money and ultimately the same freedom as men, for the success of women. Inventing Judith, a fictional sister of Shakespeare, Woolf demands that we consider the factors necessary for creativity and women’s historical deprivation of all of these in a world dominated by men.
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