Overall Sports Book of the Year Award

The Sports Book Awards, in association with the Sunday Times, is the major annual promotion for sports writing and publishing, the awards exist to highlight the most outstanding sports books of the previous calendar year, to showcase their merits and to enhance their reputation and profile.

Judges include our most decorated sports writers, leading pundits, world cup winning captains, as well as association bodies, TV commentary teams and well-known cultural personalities.

WINNER 2025

My Beautiful Sisters

Popal, Khalida ISBN: 9781399805742
Paperback / softback

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A story of survival, sisterhood and the fight for feminism in the age of the Taliban.

August 2021: Kabul falls to the Taliban. Overnight, life for women across Afghanistan changes. The national women's football team faces an imminent threat to their lives, just for playing sport. For Khalida Popal, the team's first captain and co-founder, this is not an unprecedented event. Born in Afghanistan, as a child she fled Taliban rule with her family and grew up in a refugee camp in Pakistan. On her return to Afghanistan, football gave her and her teammates power, comradeship and freedom. But advocating for women's rights in sport put Popal's life increasingly at risk, forcing her to flee the country, this time alone. As a refugee in Denmark, Popal worked to uncover widespread sexual abuse of players by the former president of the Afghanistan Football Federation - forcing FIFA and the government of Afghanistan to act. When Kabul falls Khalida is safe, but her teammates are left behind. Against all the odds, she and a small but mighty network of allies orchestrate an international evacuation strategy to save them. My Beautiful Sisters is a gripping memoir about courage, the power of teamwork against all odds and the existence of hope in dark times.

- Browns Books Synopsis