Filipino-Indian memoirist Deepa Paul long-listed for Women’s Prize in Non-Fiction Writing

For memoirist Deepa Paul, writing about love, especially love outside convention and tradition, was never about provocation.

It was about truth.

Her book Ask Me How It Works: Love in an Open Marriage is, in summary, a story of polyamory, which in contemporary speak goes by many names: ethical non-monogamy or open relationships.

But within its pages unfolds an intimate and deeply personal account of sexuality, marriage, motherhood, and migration. In these layered contours that make up Paul’s life, her memoir is a meditation on what it means to be a Filipino woman creating her own meaning from inherited values while navigating new ways of thinking and loving in Amsterdam.

“I am not here to win souls for my life choices. I am also not here to teach people how to live. I am here to be true to my experience,” Paul said. 

That insistence on lived truth defines Paul’s work as a memoirist and has earned her a place in the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction 2026 Longlist. Judges lauded the inclusion of the book for its “open, tender writing” that is an “exploration of body, sexuality, and desire told through responses to the questions asked about her open marriage.”

Authors included in the Women’s Prize Longlist include novelist Arundhati Roy for her memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me, and author Sarah Perry for her account of her father-in-law’s death by cancer. 

Established in the United Kingdom to celebrate excellence in women’s writing, the prize has historically highlighted works on politics, science, history, and social issues. The inclusion of a memoir centered on sexuality, migration, and the Filipino female experience signals a widening literary horizon.

For Paul, the recognition affirms that women’s interior lives — their relationships, desires, doubts — carry intellectual and cultural weight.

“To see that our inner worlds are considered as valid as medicine or sociology is incredibly meaningful,” she said.

The Short List is set to be released by the end of March, while the winners of the Women’s Prize are expected to be announced on June 11, 2026. 

Migration: A space for re-examination

Paul’s story is inseparable from migration. Leaving the Philippines not only altered her surroundings, but it also disrupted the narratives she had inherited about love, commitment, and what it means to be a “good woman.”

In her writing, migration becomes a point of rupture and curious inquiry. Building a new life in an unfamiliar place became the space where cultural scripts were paused, questioned, rewritten.

“Life-changing milestones such as marriage, migration, and motherhood can reveal us completely differently,” said Paul.

It is the kind of representation many Filipino women have been searching for. At the Frankfurt Book Fair last September, Filipino women living in other parts of Europe clamored for a copy of Paul’s book, which had sold out. They were not in open marriages, they said, but they wanted to read about someone who looked like them, raised as they were, and taught to love as they were asking different questions.

The exploration of female sexuality 

Paul’s work comes at a moment when female sexuality is being dissected and discussed in ways that it has never been before. Still, there is a hesitation around narratives that center the desire and pleasure of Asian and South Asian women.

While the circumstances of Paul’s life may be unique, the emotional terrain she maps is widely shared. In her book readings, women from Ukraine, from Africa, and other parts of the world recognize parts of their own lives in Paul’s negotiation between duty and desire, belonging and freedom, intimacy and self.

“There is something universal about women not having the space to ask destabilizing questions about autonomy, self-discovery, and fulfillment,” said Paul.

The strongest impact of Paul’s memoir is its relatability. Paul’s narrative becomes less about unconventional relationships and more about a universal journey and a search for a life whose meaning is fashioned by experience rather than social expectation. 

Act of personal reckoning

Yet Paul does not write from a place of rejection of tradition. Her memoir is anchored in the Filipino values of devotion to family, emotional resilience, and sacrifice, even as it probes their limits. This duality gives her work its narrative tension and nuance. Paul is both insider and observer, daughter of a culture and critic of its often unquestioned impositions.

Her words transform private experience into cultural inquiry. Scenes of domestic life become meditations on gendered expectations. Moments of intimacy unfold alongside explorations of identity. The personal, in Paul’s hands, is neither confessional nor sensational, but searching.

Ultimately, Paul’s memoir is an act of reckoning with the body, with love, with the stories she inherited and the ones she chooses to tell. In writing them, she does not ask for approval or agreement. She asks only that they be seen. Because it is in that insistence that a space opens for other women to ask their own questions and find their own answers. – Rappler.com 

Ana P. Santos is Rappler’s gender and sexuality columnist and host of the video series ‘Sex and Sensibilities.’ She has a postgraduate degree in Gender  (Sexuality) from the London School of Economics and Political Science as a Chevening scholar.