The Prize announces 2024 shortlist
10 October 2024
We are set to celebrate our 25th anniversary by holding a Winner of Winners Award to recognise the outstanding work of the previous 24 prizewinners. This special one-off award will crown the best work of non-fiction from the last 25 years of the prize.
The judges of the Winner of Winners Award are: New Statesman editor-in-chief, Jason Cowley (chair); academic, critic and broadcaster, Shahidha Bari; journalist, author and academic, Sarah Churchwell; and biographer and critic Frances Wilson.
Together they will select a shortlist from the 24 previous winners of the prize (announced on 9 March), before choosing an overall winner. The winner will be announced on 27 April at an event held at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh.
The anniversary will also be marked by a one-off documentary – All The Best Stories Are True – which explores the very best in non-fiction writing over the past 25 years. From nail-biting moments to life changing stories, the documentary uncovers how the prize started out as the non-fiction rival to the Booker, and what the next 25 years hold for readers and writers in a world now steeped in ‘fake news’. It will be available to watch on the Baillie Gifford Prize YouTube this February.
In addition to this, Waterstones will be celebrating the 25th anniversary with displays of all 24 previous winners, paying tribute to the Baillie Gifford Prize’s history and influence as the biggest UK-based non-fiction book prize.
The 24 books in contention are (by year of win):
Antony Beevor
Stalingrad
(Viking, Penguin Random House)
David Cairns
Berlioz: Servitude and Greatness 1832-1869
(Allen Lane, Penguin Random House UK)
Michael Burleigh
The Third Reich: A New History
(Macmillan, Pan Macmillan)
Margaret Macmillan
Peacemakers: Six Months That Changed The World
(John Murray Press, Hachette)
T.J. Binyon
Pushkin: A Biography
(HarperCollins)
Anna Funder
Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall
(Granta)
Jonathan Coe
Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of B.S. Johnson
(Picador, Pan Macmillan)
James Shapiro
1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare
(Faber & Faber)
Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone
(Bloomsbury)
Kate Summerscale
The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, Or, The Murder at Road Hill House
(Bloomsbury)
Philip Hoare
Leviathan, or the Whale
(4th Estate, HarperCollins)
Barbara Demick
Nothing to Envy: Real Lives in North Korea
(Granta)
Frank Dikötter
Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-1962
(Bloomsbury)
Wade Davis
Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest
(The Bodley Head, Vintage, Penguin Random House UK)
Lucy Hughes-Hallett
The Pike: Gabriele d’Annunzio, Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War
(4th Estate, HarperCollins)
Helen Macdonald
H is for Hawk
(Jonathan Cape, Penguin Random House)
Steve Silberman
NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and How to Think Smarter About People Who Think Differently
(Allen and Unwin)
Philippe Sands
East West Street: on the origins of genocide and crimes against humanity
(Weidenfeld & Nicholson, The Orion Publishing Group)
David France
How to Survive a Plague: The Inside Story of How Citizens and Science Tamed AIDS
(Picador, Pan Macmillan)
Serhii Plokhy
Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy
(Allen Lane, Penguin Random House UK)
Hallie Rubenhold
The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper
(Doubleday, Penguin Random House UK)
Craig Brown
One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time
(4th Estate, HarperCollins)
Patrick Radden Keefe
Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty
(Doubleday, Penguin Random House UK)
Katherine Rundell
Super Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne
(Faber & Faber)
9 October 2024
9 October 2024
8 October 2024