The Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction

Rosie Boycott

Rosie Boycott (Chair) has had a highly distinguished career in journalism, having been the first woman editor of two national broadsheets, the Independent on Sunday and The Independent, and a national tabloid, the Daily Express. During the seventies she founded and edited Spare Rib, and then went on to found the highly successful Virago Press, publisher of women’s writing. She is also an author in her own right, amongst her titles ‘A Nice Girl Like Me’.

Rosie Boycott is a regular participant on BBC Two's Late Review, she presents Radio Four’s A Good Read and often contributes to TV and radio. Last year she made one of the BBC’s Great Briton films on Princess Diana. In the past Rosie Boycott has chaired theOrange Prize for Fiction and, whilst she was editor at Esquire magazine, she pioneered the Esquire Prize for Non-Fiction.

Michael Portillo

Michael Portillo rose up the ranks of the Conservative party, representing his constituency for 13 years until his defeat in 1997. As a Cabinet Minister he was Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Secretary of State for Employment and Secretary of State for Defence.Portillo went on to make a name in journalism. In addition to many articles and book reviews he made ‘Portillo’s Progress’ (Channel 4, 1998), a three part series about politics, a programme in the Great Railway Series (BBC, 1999), which was partly a biography of his late father. Re-elected to Parliament in 1999 Michael Portillo is MP for Kensington and Chelsea. As well as having a weekly column in The Scotsman, he has made television films about Wagner and Queen Elizabeth I and is chairman of a chamber orchestra, Sinfonia 21, which is involved in pioneering work at the frontiers of music and science. Michael Portillo is a member of the International Commission on Missing Persons in the former Yugoslavia, which organises the identification of massacre victims.

Tim Radford

Tim Radford is science editor of the Guardian. He was born in New Zealand in 1940, and trained as a journalist on the New Zealand Herald. He has spent his working life in weekly, evening and daily newspapers, except for a brief period when he worked in the UK government information services between 1968 and 1973. Since joining the Guardian Tim has been (among other things) letters editor, arts editor, and literary editor. Except for a brief interval, he has also edited the Guardian's science pages since they were launched in 1980.

Andrew Roberts

Andrew Roberts’ biography of Winston Churchill’s foreign secretary, Lord Halifax, The Holy Fox was published in 1991, followed by Eminent Churchillians in 1994. As well as appearing regularly on television and radio, Roberts writes and reviews for The Sunday Telegraph, and reviews for that paper as well as The Spectator, Literary Review, Mail on Sunday and Daily Telegraph. In 1999 he published Salisbury: Victorian Titan, the biography of Lord Salisbury which won the Wolfson History Prize and the James Stern Silver Pen Award for Non-Fiction.Napoleon and Wellington was published in 2001 and Hitler and Churchill: Secrets of Leadership earlier this year.

Fiammetta Rocco

Fiammetta Rocco, culture correspondent at The Economist, was the books and arts editor for 15 years from 2003 to 2018, supervising the publication’s print and online book reviews and culture coverage. She is also culture editor of The Economist’s bi-monthly magazine, 1843. Rocco has written two Economist special reports, one on the art market and the other on the future of museums. She has served on juries for several book prizes, both for fiction and non-fiction, and is the administrator of the Man Booker International Prize for fiction. Reflecting on an early bout of malaria when she was a child living in Kenya, her book, "The Miraculous Fever-Tree: Malaria and the Quest for a Cure that Changed the World", was published in 2003. Fiammetta Rocco’s investigative journalism has won a number of awards in the United States and Britain.