Dr Leah Broad wins prestigious Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant

Each year the Whiting Foundation offers its generous Creative Nonfiction Grant to talented writers engaged in ‘original and ambitious projects’, helping them to overcome the considerable costs in time and resources of completing their works. Since the grant was established in 2016, the Foundation has supported scores of the most ambitious and groundbreaking writers of today, including many who have gone on to win and be shortlisted for top-tier literary prizes such as the Pulitzer Prize and the US’s National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award. 

Dr Leah Broad, an award-winning music writer, historian and public speaker, receives the Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant in support of her forthcoming book This Woman's War: Women and Music in World War II, due to be published by Faber & Faber. The work offers a history of World War II told through the unsung lives of women musicians who entertained the troops, composed original work, fought for their country in secret, and kept hope alive on the home front. 

Crossing Britain, Europe, Russia, and the United States, This Woman’s War shows how women musicians shaped wartime culture, and how their own lives changed because of the conflict. It brings together the stories of pianists Elly Ney and Myra Hess, dancers Josephine Baker and Tatiana Vecheslova, composer Avril Coleridge-Taylor, violinist Alma Rosé, and jazz band the International Sweethearts of Rhythm.

The Whiting Foundation’s judges this year recognised Dr Broad’s work as among ‘crucial works extending the form’ that are currently being composed: 'This book offers a revelatory angle on a colossal historical event, transforming what we think we know about women’s experience of war. Driving each chapter is Leah Broad’s curiosity about what it felt like for women to live in the public realm as musicians – and in often harrowing circumstances. A gifted biographical writer, she presents a fresh and kaleidoscopic account that is deeply serious about why sound and music matter. The research is seamlessly integrated into the narrative, and the writing is clear as a bell. This book brings performance to the page.'

Dr Broad, who completed her undergraduate and DPhil degrees at Christ Church, and who returned to the College in 2019 to take up a Junior Research Fellowship followed by a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship last year, is already a celebrated author. Her book Quartet: How Four Women Challenged the Musical World (2023), also a group biography of 20th-century women composers, was released to immediate emphatic acclaim, including from The Sunday Times, The Guardian, The Financial Times, the TLS and bestselling novelist Kate Mosse. For the work, Dr Broad received the 2024 Royal Philharmonic Society Prize for Storytelling and a 2024 Presto Books of the Year Award, as well as being shortlisted for the Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize 2023. These awards join a number of other honours for the writer, who was selected as one of the BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinkers in 2016, and won the Observer/Anthony Burgess Prize for Arts Journalism in 2015. 

Responding to news of her grant, Dr Broad said: ‘It’s an incredible honour to have This Woman’s War included as one of the grant recipients this year. The grant will transform what this book can be, and I’m looking forward to bringing these women's stories to readers.’

The Christ Church community would like to congratulate Dr Broad on another remarkable achievement and looks forward to the release of her forthcoming book.

Learn more about Dr Leah Broad via her personal website.