Winner of the PEN Pinter Prize 2026





'The brilliance of her literary insight, the lucidity of her prose, and the subtlety of her analyses are simply breathtaking' Edward Said

'A model of what a public intellectual should be' Slavoj Zizek





From one of the most important contemporary thinkers, a compelling, forceful tract about women and motherhood that demands immediate attention. Moving commandingly between pop cultural references such as Roald Dahl's 'Matilda' to observations about motherhood in the ancient world and thoughts about the stigmatization of single mothers in the UK, Mothers delivers a groundbreaking report into this often flattened and overlooked figure.



Jacqueline Rose is a British academic who is currently professor of Humanities at the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities. Her most recent book was Women in Dark Times. A regular contributor to the London Review of Books, she is also a co-founder of Independent Jewish Voices in the UK and a Fellow of the British Academy.