T he Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction, known as the Samuel Johnson Prize until 2015, is a literary prize open to authors of any nationality who have published a full-length work of current affairs, history, politics, science, sport, travel, biography, autobiography or art criticism in the United Kingdom over the previous twelve months. The winner receives £50,000 in prize money and has a good shot at the bestseller lists.
2024
“There’s a connection with The Narrow Road to the Deep North because that book was also concerned with his father’s experience of being a slave laborer in the Second World War: he was an Australian captured by the Japanese…what holds this part memoir, part science, part history together is the personal thread. The book begins and ends with a kayaking accident the author, Richard Flanagan, has in a river in Tasmania. He is rescued, but only just. He describes this moment when he is floating above the river, looking down at himself. Is that death?” Read more...
The Best Nonfiction Books: The 2024 Baillie Gifford Prize Shortlist
Isabel Hilton ,
Journalist
2023
“This book comes out of that fine North American tradition of nonfiction writing—a deeply researched and meticulously told account of a real event. It’s about a fire that happened up in the subarctic region of Canada, which is, by definition, very remote. It’s a very hard place to earn a living and it tells you a lot about human beings that tens of thousands of people have moved up there to work in the tar sands industry. This is a part of the oil industry that should be marginal because it’s very difficult to get the oil out. You have to expend huge amounts of electricity and natural gas to lift the sands and then to melt and render out the oil…Fire Weather tells the story of what happens when everything goes wrong and the unthinkable happens…this fire in 2016 went completely out of control. There are various reasons for that, but it points to a bigger issue around changes in the climate. The author gives you a very vivid account of that extraordinary event, which affected 90,000. It destroyed much of this place, Fort McMurray, and made a lot of people homeless. 2,400 structures were destroyed and 1,000 more were damaged.” Read more...
The Best Nonfiction Books: The 2023 Baillie Gifford Prize Shortlist
Frederick Studemann ,
Journalist
2022
🏆 Winner of the 2022 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction
🏆 Winner of the 2023 British Book Award for Non-Fiction: Narrative
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“Rundell is a children’s author who also specializes in Renaissance literature and makes the case that Donne should be as widely feted as William Shakespeare, his contemporary. She writes, ‘Donne is the greatest writer of desire in the English language. He wrote about sex in a way that nobody ever has, before or since: he wrote sex as the great insistence on life, the salute, the bodily semaphore for the human living infinite. The word most used across his poetry, part from ‘and’ and ‘the’, is ‘love”.” Read more...
Award Winning Biographies of 2022
Sophie Roell ,
Journalist
2021
“It’s a perfect blending of family history, dynastic shenanigans on a par with the Borgias, combined with a story that has just ruined so many people’s lives.”
Narrator: Patrick Radden Keefe
Length: 18 hours and 6 minutes
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“It’s an extraordinary book. He’s writing of extraordinary things, but that alone won’t make it a good book. There’s incredible artistry in putting this story together. And because he has a very transparent style—he’s a New Yorker staff writer—and it’s not fancy, it’s very easy to say, ‘Well, he just had to research it and write it down.’ But no, it’s incredibly beautifully done. It’s about the Sackler scandal, this family that’s made a fortune out of Oxycontin, this very, very addictive opioid that’s killed more Americans than have died in all the wars the country has fought since the Second World War. What he does is go back and look at the origins of the company, Purdue Pharma. It’s a fascinating story. It’s an immigrant family, Russian Jewish. The father has a grocer’s shop. They work incredibly hard. Against all the odds the three boys, the first generation, all become doctors. It is the American dream. They’re doing something extraordinary and it’s admirable at the start.” Read more...
The Best Nonfiction Books: The 2021 Baillie Gifford Prize Shortlist
Kathryn Hughes ,
Literary Scholar
2020
Craig Brown's One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time is a quirky and interesting biography of the Fab Four, full of surprising information and interesting reflections on the 1960s, the Beatles' career trajectories and the joys and pitfalls of fame. Anything by Craig Brown is always worth reading.
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2019
“Hallie Rubenhold, the author of The Five , has researched the lives of these five women absolutely brilliantly. It’s a great piece of detective work into some very obscure sources…She really disproves what the ‘Ripperologist’ literature says about the victims and recovers these women’s lives with a good deal of sympathy. It’s a moving book. It’s humane, it’s scholarly, and it challenges, from a feminist position, a whole library of books on Jack the Ripper.” Read more...
The Best History Books: the 2020 Wolfson Prize shortlist
Richard Evans ,
Historian
2018
Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy is a gripping and highly readable book by Harvard historian Serhii Plokhy about the Chernobyl nuclear accident of April 26th, 1986 at Pripyat, in what is now Ukraine . The audiobook is read by the British actor Leighton Pugh.
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“He’s really good here at laying down the background of the disaster itself, the plant’s construction, the days leading up to it, the moments the accident occurred. He talks about the accident itself, the delay in informing the public, the censorship of news, the trial of the nuclear power plant operators who he thinks were treated as scapegoats, and the political outcomes of all this deception.” Read more...
The best books on Chernobyl
Kate Brown ,
Historian
2017
🏆 Winner of the 2017 Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction
David France was a gay man living in New York City in the early 1980s. The book tells the story of how his social circle was decimated by the disease, but it also tells the story of how AIDS, ultimately and in the face of great prejudice, changed social attitudes towards homosexuality. On top of the personal and social story, he tells the industrial/science story of how big pharma and governments sought to come up with a cure for the disease.
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2016
“This is a fantastic and very impressive book. He manages to maintain lots of different storylines through quite complex material, in a way that I found completely absorbing. He’s tracing the history of the notion of war crimes and genocide, through two lawyers who were most associated with the Nuremberg trials. They were not related to each other, and didn’t even knew each other very well, but they both came from the same town in Poland that his grandfather also came from…It’s also telling a story of the Holocaust, and how his grandparents managed to escape Vienna quite late and get back to London. There are lots of unanswered questions and loose ends in the story that he gets told by his mother and his grandfather never talked about it. He follows up all of these loose ends, including trying to find the mysterious woman who saved his mother’s life by taking her, as a baby, across Europe, for what turns out to be bizarre motives.” Read more...
Best Nonfiction Books of 2016
Stephanie Flanders ,
Economist
2015
“Steve’s book reads like a novel. He’s a science writer but he tells wonderful stories…Read this book if you want to get a sense, from the socio-cultural and also from the historical diagnostic perspective, of how this concept of autism developed, and how the concept of autism has changed over the years, and if there really is an autism epidemic. Steve believes that there is not. Steve believes that we are just recognising people with autism and the category has expanded so greatly that that can account for the numbers we’re seeing today that we’ve never seen before of diagnosed people. It’s a wonderful book…It’s considered to be a game-changing book in terms of our understanding of autism.” Read more...
The best books on Autism
Barry Prizant ,
Medical Scientist
2014
🏆 Winner of the 2014 Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction
It’s not an exaggeration to say that H is for Hawk, published in 2014, is already a classic of nature writing . In the audiobook, author Helen MacDonald narrates her touching memoir.
Narrator: Helen MacDonald
Length: 11 hours and 5 minutes
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“Macdonald’s descriptions and experiences raising goshawks are intimate, full of details that animate the focal predator as much as Sapolsky’s baboons. In other words, raptors have character in H is for Hawk . They are also, in fact, characters in the book: Macdonald gives her particular goshawk the name Mabel. I think Macdonald’s take on Mabel and her kin is surprising to most people because we tend to extol mammalian predators, which are most like us, over the scaly and feathery ones, which are more unlike than like. H is for Hawk feels like the definitive statement on hawks for the modern times, and I think its success has a lot to do with how well Macdonald tied her inquiry into the life of a hawk with her own personal experience and journey.” Read more...
The best books on Predators
Nick Pyenson ,
Science Writer
2013
Lucy Hughes-Hallett's biography of Gabriele D’Annunzio—the story of the Italian poet and aristocrat's "evolution from idealist Romantic to radical right-wing revolutionary"—offers an insight into the cultish elements of nationalism, the origins of extremism, and the dangers of huge personal charisma. It was declared the 'biography of the decade' by The Times , and won both the Costa biography prize and the Samuel Johnson Prize for Nonfiction (now known as the Baillie Gifford Prize , the UK's most prestigious prize for nonfiction) in 2013.
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2012
Wade Davis's account of the race to the top of Everest puts the daredevil activities of the climbers into their proper context, viewing Mallory and his team's doomed attempt as a response to the heroic futility of their experiences the First World War.
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2011
🏆 Winner of the 2011 Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction
Dikotter's unflinching account of Mao Zedong's disastrous 'Great Leap Forward,' his attempt to overtake the dominance of the West in a space of a few years, describes in heartbreaking detail and with groundbreaking research the circumstances that led to more than 45 million Chinese people being worked, starved or beaten to death between the years of 1958 and 1962.
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2010
“This is probably my favourite work of narrative nonfiction ever. It’s such an amazing book. She’s written about life in North Korea, which is one of the most difficult to access, closed regimes in the world, and she’s done it through very, very detailed interviews with North Korean defectors, mainly in South Korea, where she was based at the time, working as a foreign correspondent. It’s so compelling. It reads like a novel, a real page turner.” Read more...
The Best Narrative Nonfiction Books
Samira Shackle ,
Journalist
2009
“This is a wonderful book. It is about the whale, and everything about the whale – its history, its myth and its science. Whales are huge and compelling, and Philip Hoare’s excitement about them comes through. It is also a very handsome book and very nicely illustrated. We learn a lot about their lives but we also learn about the lore of whales – why they have always been important to us, and what throughout history has been thought about them. The crowning example is Moby Dick , which inspired Hoare to write his book. Moby Dick was in many ways about a mythological version of whales. As Melville intended, it tells us more about us than it does about the whale. It’s about hysteria really – concepts of evil and our hysterical reactions to them.” Read more...
Favourite Science Books
Mark Kurlansky ,
Science Writer
2008
“This is a completely gripping book that looks at a notorious Victorian murder case, often referred to as the Road Hill House case, involving the murder of the young boy, apparently taken from his bed, one night in 1860. Summerscale manages to balance the psychological dynamics of living in a house with many secrets and tensions in the Kent family and the mechanics of the crime solving plot, exactly where are the different members of the household at critical moments. So the story zips along, drawing out the central mystery, without sacrificing psychological depth or historical context.” Read more...
The best books on True Crime
Cara Robertson ,
Lawyer
2007
🏆 Winner of the 2007 Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction ☆ Shortlisted for the National Book Award
The former Baghdad bureau chief of The Washington Post
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2006
2005
In this award-winning literary biography, Jonathan Coe narrates the life of the uncompromising, erratic avant-garde author B.S. Johnson, whose experimental works included a novel-in-a-box (whose chapters could be read in any order) and a novel with holes cut through the pages. In keeping with its subject matter, Like a Fiery Elephant also takes unusual form.
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2004
“The book is about people’s lives in East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Anna Funder is an Australian journalist who was living in Berlin after the fall of the wall. She was really interested in the fact that the stories of East Germans just weren’t being told. The book is the account of her attempts to find these stories. She speaks to people who were resisting the Stasi – the secret police that controlled East Germany – and to people who were involved in the regime. It’s incredibly gripping, an eye opening account of the ways that people’s lives were touched—sometimes in small ways, and often in huge, seismic ways. Through these close, personal retellings she builds up a compelling view of the whole infrastructure of control.” Read more...
The Best Narrative Nonfiction Books
Samira Shackle ,
Journalist
2003
T. J. Binyon's prize-winning biography charts the tempestuous life of the great poet, while evoking the splendor of 19th-century Russia. Literary Review called it "as gripping as it is comprehensive."
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2002
“This is the best shortcut to the history of the 20th century. She focuses on the meeting between Lloyd George, Georges Clemenceau and Woodrow Wilson that decided what the new boundaries would be for the world at Versailles in 1919. On one level it is a great human drama, with Italy popping in and out depending on the state of its government, the origins of the conflict between Greece and Turkey and the Iraq war. That is all the fault of a woman who was a bit in love with Lawrence of Arabia and insisted on creating this country, Iraq. Rupert Murdoch’s father makes an appearance and what has happened in Palestine has its roots here too. Everything for right or wrong in the 20th century, the League of Nations and then the UN…all started here.” Read more...
The best books on Power and Ideas
James Purnell ,
Politician
2001
🏆 Winner of the 2001 Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction (now the Baillie Gifford Prize)
A broadly-focused, single volume history of Nazi Germany that sweeps together theoretical accounts with the experience of everyday people swept up in, or victimised by, Hitler's movement.
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2000
In the second volume of his magisterial biography of the Romantic composer, veteran music critic David Cairns narrates the genesis of Berlioz's most famous works, including the Requiem , Romeo and Juliet, and The Trojans.
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1999
“He’s written a lot of good books and he’s rightly considered to be a preeminent historian of World War Two. For me, Stalingrad is by far his best book, and I’ve read nearly all of them. It’s magnificent and gripping. He took a story that hadn’t been told for quite a while and did a lot of important new research. There was that window when you could actually get into the archives, and he was able to get in. He just told a damn good story. It’s a wonderful story anyway, but he told it in a way that—it’s a cliché—but was hard to put down. It’s very easy to put down history books, especially big, long tomes. They’re not usually written for the benefit of the casual reader or to be page-turners. This was just really good storytelling. He followed the rhythms of a great narrative, the way the battle developed, the climax, the way that everything became very brutal and very tense. He did a superb job of tracking that narrative and making it really come to life.” Read more...
The best books on World War II Battles
Alex Kershaw ,
Historian
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