The Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction

The Rt Hon David Willetts MP

David Willetts (Chair)’s role as Minister for Universities and Science encompasses higher education, science, technology and innovation. Willetts is also a Governor of the Ditchley Foundation and a member of the Council of the Institute for Fiscal Studies. He has written widely on economic and social policy, and his book The Pinch: How the baby boomers took their children’s future – and why they should give it back was published by Atlantic Books in 2010.

Patrick French

Patrick French is an award-winning British writer and biographer. His most recent book, India: A Portrait, is a study of Indian politics, economics and society since 1947. He is also the author of Younghusband, Liberty or Death, Tibet, Tibet and The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul. His work has won prizes including The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, the Hawthornden Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award, the Royal Society of Literature Heinemann Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Paul Laity

Paul Laity is the non-fiction editor of The Guardian, commissioning book reviews, features and interviews on the Review supplement and the website. He has been at the paper since 2007. Before that, he worked for a dozen years as a senior editor at the London Review of Books. He has been a lecturer at Oxford University, and in 2002 edited the Left Book Club Anthology.

Bronwen Maddox

Bronwen Maddox is the Editor and Chief Executive of Prospect Magazine, the UK's leading current affairs and culture monthly title. She continues to write columns for The Times on world news and economics. Previously, she was Chief Foreign Commentator and Foreign Editor of The Times. She is the author of In Defence of America, a book arguing the case for supporting the US after the Iraq war, published in the UK and US in 2008.

Professor Raymond Tallis

Professor Raymond Tallis is a philosopher, poet, novelist and cultural critic and was until recently a physician and clinical scientist. In the Economist's Intelligent Life Magazine (Autumn 2009) he was listed as one of the top living polymaths in the world. His most recent book is In Defence of Wonder and Other Philosophical Reflections, published in 2012.