The Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction

Stig Abell

Stig Abell (Chair) is the editor and publisher of the Times Literary Supplement, which he thinks is the most important literary publication in the world. He also presents Front Row, an arts magazine show on Radio 4, and pops up as a commentator on Sky News, CNN and the BBC. He has written for almost every newspaper in Britain, and one or two in America as well. Stig's career has been rather odd: he has been the Director of the Press Complaints Commission and the Managing Editor of Britain's biggest newspaper (The Sun). He has also worked in crisis communications, although not for very long. His career peak came when he got the highest first in English at Cambridge for two consecutive years; and it has been downhill pretty much ever since. Stig's book How Britain Really Works was published last year.

Robert Douglas Fairhurst

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst is Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford and a Fellow and Tutor at Magdalen College. He is the author of Victorian Afterlives (OUP, 2002), Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist (Harvard UP, 2011), which was awarded the 2011 Duff Cooper Prize, and The Story of Alice: Lewis Carroll and the Secret History of Wonderland (Harvill Secker and Harvard UP), which was shortlisted for the 2015 Costa Prize. He writes regularly for publications including the Guardian, TLS, Times, Spectator, Literary Review, and New Statesman. In 2013 he was a Judge of the Man Booker Prize, and in 2015 he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Dr Myriam Francois

Dr Myriam Francois is a journalist, TV producer and writer. Her documentaries have appeared on Channel 4 and BBC1 among others. She was Europe Correspondent for TRTWorld, a global news network on Sky 519, from 2015-2017, and has also reported for BBC World news. Myriam’s writing has been featured widely in the British press, including The Guardian, New Statesman, the Telegraph, CNN online and Middle East Eye. She is a frequent fixture on talk shows such as the BBC Big Questions, Sunday Morning Live and paper reviews.

Myriam also delivers talks and lectures internationally. She has spoken at universities including Oxford, McGill and Harvard university, is a regular speaker at the HowTheLightGetsIn, Hay-on-Wye Festival and the Bradford Literary Festival. Myriam is a Research Associate at the Centre of Islamic Studies (CIS) at SOAS University, where her research focuses on British Muslim integration issues. She is also a Senior Fellow at the Centre for Global Policy (CGP) think tank.

Petina Gappah

Petina Gappah is an award-winning and widely translated Zimbabwean writer. She is the author of the novels Out of Darkness, Shining Light (2019) and The Book of Memory (2015); and two short story collections, Rotten Row (2016) and An Elegy for Easterly (2010). Petina's work has been shortlisted for the Orwell Prize, the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the PEN America Open Book Award, the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, the Women's Prize for Fiction, and the Prix Femina (Étrangers). She is the recipient of the Guardian First Book Award and the McKitterick Prize from the Society of Authors. A lawyer specialising in international trade and investment as well as a writer, after living and working in Geneva for many years, and in Berlin as a fellow of the DAAD, Petina now lives in Harare.

Dr Xand van Tulleken

Dr Xand van Tulleken trained in medicine at the University of Oxford, he has a diploma in Tropical Medicine from the University of Liverpool and a Master's in Public Health from Harvard where he was a Fulbright Scholar. He was the Helen Hamlyn Senior Fellow at Fordham University’s Institute of International Humanitarian Affairs 2011-2017. His primary interest is the delivery of healthcare to crisis affected people. He has worked for Doctors of the World, Merlin and the World Health Organization in a number of humanitarian crises and is the associate editor of the Oxford Handbook of Humanitarian Medicine.

Frances Wilson

Frances Wilson is a critic and biographer. Her most recent book, Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas De Quincey was long-listed for the 2016 Baillie Gifford Prize, and shortlisted for the National Book Circle Critic's Award, the LA Times Book Awards, the Historical Writer's Association Non-fiction award and the BIO Plutarch Prize. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and was recently the 2018/19 Jean Strouse Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B Cullman Centre for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. She teaches Creative Writing at Goldsmiths College, University of London.