The Prize Announces its 2022 Longlist

The longlist for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction, which celebrates the best in non-fiction writing, is announced today, Thursday 22 September.

The prize aims to recognise and reward the best of non-fiction and is open to authors of any nationality. It covers all non-fiction in the areas of current affairs, history, politics, science, sport, travel, biography, autobiography and the arts. The winner will receive £50,000 and each of the shortlisted authors will receive £1,000.

The longlist of 12 books were chosen by this year’s judging panel: writer and Associate Editor of The Bookseller, Caroline Sanderson (chair); writer and science journalist, Laura Spinney; critic and writer for The Observer, Rachel Cooke; BBC journalist and presenter, Clive Myrie; author and New Yorker writer, Samanth Subramanian; and critic and broadcaster, Georgina Godwin. Their selection was made from 362 books published between 1 November 2021 and 31 October 2022.

The titles on this year’s longlist are:

Author / translator (Nationality)

Title (Imprint)

Caroline Elkins (American)

Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire (The Bodley Head, Vintage, Penguin Random House UK)

 

Andrea Elliott (American)

Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City (Hutchinson Heinemann, Cornerstone, Penguin Random House UK)

 

Jonathan Freedland (British)

 

The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World (John Murray Press, Hachette)

 

Thomas Halliday (British)

Otherlands: A World in the Making (Allen Lane, Penguin Press, Penguin Random House UK)

 

Daisy Hay (British)

Dinner With Joseph Johnson: Books and Friendship in a Revolutionary Age (Chatto and Windus, Vintage, Penguin Random House UK)

 

Sally Hayden (Irish)

My Fourth Time, We Drowned: Seeking Refuge on the World's Deadliest Migration Route (4th Estate, HarperCollins)

 

Matt Rowland Hill (British)

Original Sins: A Memoir (Chatto and Windus, Vintage, Penguin Random House UK)

 

Anna Keay (British)

The Restless Republic: Britain Without a Crown (William Collins, Harper Collins)

 

Polly Morland (British)

A Fortunate Woman: A Country Doctor’s Story (Picador, Pan Macmillan)

 

Scholastique Mukasonga (French/Rwandan)

Translated by Jordan Stump

 

The Barefoot Woman (Daunt Originals, Daunt Books Publishing)

 

Katherine Rundell (British)

 

Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne (Faber & Faber)

 

Jing Tsu (American)

Kingdom of Characters: A Tale of Language, Obsession, and Genius in Modern China (Allen Lane, Penguin Press, Penguin Random House UK)

 

Caroline Sanderson, chair of judges, says:
“It was a fiendishly difficult, but also highly enjoyable process by which my fellow judges and I arrived at the final 12 books in contention for the 2022 Baillie Gifford Prize. I'm delighted with our longlist which shows off non-fiction in all its splendid breadth, depth and scope; from outstanding reportage, and compelling memoir to illuminating history books and mind-expanding popular science. And perhaps most importantly, all 12 books have been written with the experience of the reader firmly in mind.”

This year’s longlist includes two books which reveal unsung historical figures. With The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World, Jonathan Freedland reveals the heroism of Rudolf Vrba, who in 1944 at the age of nineteen, alongside fellow inmate Fred Wetzler, became the first Jews ever to break out of Auschwitz. Freedland explores Vrba’s life following this, and his mission to reveal to the world the truth of the Holocaust, which would see him reach Roosevelt, Churchill and the pope and eventually save over 200,000 lives. Daisy Hay’s biography of Joseph Johnson, Dinner With Joseph Johnson: Books and Friendship in a Revolutionary Age, explores the bookseller and publisher’s weekly meetings with a shifting constellation of extraordinary writers of contrasting politics and personalities. In this portrait of a revolutionary age, Hay captures a changing nation through the stories of the men and women who wrote it into being, and whose ideas still influence us today.

The history of the British Empire is explored in Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire by Caroline Elkins. This searing, landmark study lays bare the British Empire’s pervasive use of violence throughout the twentieth century. Drawing on more than a decade of research on four continents, Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire implicates all sides of the political divide regarding the creation, execution, and cover-up of imperial violence.

Inspiring modern day stories of tackling extreme adversity are also revealed. Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Andrea Elliott tells the unforgettable story of Dasani Coates. Based on nearly a decade of reporting, it follows Coates over eight dramatic years in which she is tested by homelessness, poverty and racism in an unequal America. My Fourth Time, We Drowned: Seeking Refuge on the World's Deadliest Migration Route by Sally Hayden, which won The Orwell Prize 2022, unpicks the ramifications of a Western world that has turned its back on refugees, fuelling one of the most devastating human rights disasters in history. At its heart, this is a book about people who have made unimaginable choices, risking everything to survive in a system that wants them to be silent and disappear.

In Original Sins: A Memoir, Matt Rowland Hill recalls growing up as the son of a minister in an evangelical Christian church in south Wales and then south-east England. It was a childhood fraught with bitter family conflict and the fear of damnation. After a devastating loss of faith in his late teens, Matt began his search for salvation elsewhere, turning to books before developing a growing relationship with alcohol and drugs. A memoir of faith, family, shame and addiction, it shows how hope can arrive in the most unexpected forms, and how the stories we tell might help us survive. The Barefoot Woman by Scholastique Mukasonga memorialises a lost childhood, family and way of life. The only one of her Tutsi family to escape the Hutu massacre, Scholastique weaves the shroud she was unable to make with words, drawing on inherited traditions of storytelling, offering a loving and devastating tribute. She recounts her family’s exile and the subsequent efforts of her mother and others to maintain ritual and community on the dry border of Rwanda and Burundi, and she illuminates the concerns and strengths of her mother as she fights for her children’s safety.

Unusual tellings and little told stories also feature on the list. Otherlands: A World in the Making by Thomas Halliday explores the vast pre-history of earth in an exhilarating journey into deep time, showing us our planet as it used to exist, and the worlds that were here before ours. Travelling back in time to the dawn of complex life, and across all seven continents, Halliday gives us a mesmerising up close encounter with eras that are normally unimaginably distant. The Restless Republic: Britain Without a Crown by Anna Keay looks back to 1649, when Britain was engulfed by revolution. On a raw January afternoon, the Stuart king, Charles I, was executed for treason. Within weeks the English monarchy had been abolished and the ‘useless and dangerous’ House of Lords discarded. The Restless Republic: Britain Without a Crown is the bizarrely little told story of Britain’s time as a republic, with people who lived through those years taken as guides. It is the story of how these tempestuous years set the British Isles on a new course, and of what happened when a conservative people tried revolution. Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne by Katherine Rundell gives readers a window into the little known myriad lives the poet John Donne lived. The book shows us the many sides of his life, his obsessions, his blazing words, and his tempestuous Elizabethan times – unveiling Donne as the most remarkable mind and as a lesson in living.

A Fortunate Woman: A Country Doctor’s Story by Polly Morland tells of the author’s discovery of the book A Fortunate Man by Jogn Berger, a 1967 account of a country doctor working in the same valley she lives in more than half a century earlier. This chance discovery led Morland to the remarkable doctor who serves that valley community today, a woman whose own medical vocation was inspired by reading the very same book as a teenager. Kingdom of Characters: A Tale of Language, Obsession, and Genius in Modern China by Jing Tsu charters the period of a nation reinventing the world’s oldest living language. China today is one of the world's most powerful nations, yet just a century ago it was a crumbling empire with literacy reserved for the elite few, left behind in the wake of Western technology. Tsu highlights that China's most daunting challenge was a linguistic one: to make the formidable Chinese language - a 2,200-year-old writing system that was daunting to natives and foreigners alike - accessible to a globalized, digital world. The book follows the bold innovators who adapted the Chinese script - and the value-system it represents - to the technological advances that would shape the twentieth century and beyond, from the telegram to the typewriter to the smartphone.

The announcement of the six books shortlisted for this year’s prize will take place on Monday 10 October in a live event at Cheltenham Literature Festival with the announcement itself livestreamed to the prize and partner social media platforms including FacebookLive and YouTube.

The winner will be announced on Thursday 17 November at an award ceremony at the Science Museum, generously supported by the Blavatnik Foundation. The announcement will also be livestreamed across the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction social channels.

Last year’s winner was Patrick Radden Keefe for Empire of Pain, which became a Sunday Times bestseller.