The Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction

Claire Tomalin

Claire Tomalin (Chair) was literary editor of the New Statesman and Sunday Times before becoming a prize-winning author. In 1974 her first book The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft won the Whitbread First Book Prize. Since then she has written Shelley and His World (1980); Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life (1987); The Invisible Woman: the story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens (1991), now a film, released in 2013; Mrs Jordan's Profession (1994); Jane Austen: A Life (1997); Samuel Pepys: the Unequalled Self (2002); Thomas Hardy: The Time-Torn Man (2006). Most recently, her Charles Dickens: A Life was published in 2011. Claire has an honorary doctorate from Cambridge University. She has served on the Committee of the London Library and as a Trustee of the National Portrait Gallery and the Wordsworth Trust. She is a Vice-President of the Royal Literary Fund, of the Royal Society of Literature and of English PEN.

Alan Johnson MP

Alan Johnson MP was born in May 1950. He was General Secretary of the Communication Workers Union before entering Parliament as Labour MP for Hull West and Hessle in 1997. He served as Home Secretary from June 2009 to May 2010. He filled a wide variety of cabinet positions in both the Blair and Brown governments, including Health Secretary and Education Secretary. Until January 2011 Alan Johnson was Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer. His childhood memoir This Boy was published by Bantam Press in May 2013.

Lorien Kite

Lorien Kite is the books editor of the Financial Times. He has been at the newspaper since 2000, working most recently as deputy comment editor and assistant analysis editor before taking on his current role in 2011. Prior to the FT he spent five years in publishing.

Ray Monk

Ray Monk is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southampton and the author of several biographies, including Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the Duff Cooper Award) and, most recently, Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer.

Ruth Scurr

Ruth Scurr is an historian, biographer and literary critic. She teaches history and politics at Cambridge University, where she is a Lecturer and Fellow of Gonville & Caius College. Her first book, Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution won the Franco-British Society Literary Prize in 2006 and was listed among the 100 Best Books of the Decade in The Times in 2009. Her second book, a biography of the antiquarian John Aubrey, John Aubrey: My Own Life, will be published by Chatto & Windus in 2015. She reviews regularly for the Times Literary Supplement, The Telegraph and the Wall Street Journal. She was a Man Booker Judge in 2007 and is a member of the Folio Prize Academy.