Reni Eddo-Lodge’s book Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race has been named the most influential book written by a woman. The 2017 book bested titles including Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch.

Academics, booksellers and publishers curated a list of the “Top 10 books by women that changed the world”, which was voted on by members of the public. Titles on the list range from Eddo-Lodge’s polemic on race to Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl. Eddo-Lodge’s book, which won the the Jhalak prize for the best book by a British writer of colour, received 12% of the public vote.

Other books on the list included Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, was conducted for Academic book week.

Eddo-Lodge said her win was “an honour”.

“My book, less than a year old, is a baby compared to the titans and bona fide classics on this shortlist,” she said. “In fact, we need a few more years to determine if it’s really changed the world. However, I will respect this public vote. Thank you to all who voted for Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race. I hope it instigates world-changing passion in my readers.”

Eddo-Lodge’s book is a confrontation of racism in Britain, which she says is a country “still profoundly uncomfortable with race and difference”. The book “couldn’t be more timely”, said Alan Staton of the Booksellers Association, which runs the annual celebration of academic books.

“Issues of race and class, which too many of our political leaders and commentators are wilfully or unconsciously simply not attuned to, have made their way to the top of the news agenda – often through tragic and shameful circumstances,” he said. “The strength of the public reception to Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race – the type of book that ignites campus debate – and the fact that it has topped this Academic book week poll, offers encouragement that there are large numbers of readers willing to intelligently engage with these issues.”