The Nine Dots Prize is the only award for a book that has not yet been written.

Every two years, our board of leading thinkers poses a new question inspired by the issues of our time – all urgent, and all relevant around the world. We then invite writers of all kinds, whether they have been published before or not, to respond to our question in no more than 3,000 words. The Prize is open to everyone, regardless of their background, and entries are judged anonymously. This means that what counts is what matters most: the strength of the ideas and the writing, and not where someone has come from, their education or their profession. This is how we find the world’s most exciting new thinkers.

For the most innovative response, the Prize awards $100,000 and a book deal with our partner, Cambridge University Press. The winner also receives support from the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) at Cambridge University. With this, they are empowered to develop their idea into a full-length book that can both be sold in bookshops and is also made available to read online for free, ensuring essential ideas are available to all.

In 2024, for our fifth cycle, we asked: Is data failing us? We received more than six hundred entries from around the world. The one that impressed us most was by the American journalist Grace Huckins, who argued that the explosion of public large-scale datasets and the rapid advancement of AI is leading to a prioritisation of prediction over understanding, and will call into question the very fundamentals of scientific enquiry and what it is for.

The resulting book, The Prediction Revolution, sees Huckins delve further into their investigation, exploring in detail both the promise – and the perils – of our bold new technologies.

Huckins joins an impressive and growing roster of Nine Dots Prize winners, alongside tech strategist turned Oxford philosopher James Williams, writer and journalist Annie Zaidi, journalist Trish Lorenz and scholar-activist Dr Joanna Kusiak.

We are sure that with The Prediction Revolution, our newest winner, will make a tremendous impact, igniting curiosity, inspiring hope, and sparking vital conversations.

Professor Riccardo Rebonato

Professor of Finance at EDHEC Business School, Interim Chair of the Nine Dots Prize Board

For more about the Nine Dots Prize, please visit: ninedotsprize.org