The Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction

Martha Kearney

Martha Kearney (Chair) is a presenter on BBC Radio 4, she began her career in broadcasting as a phone-in operator at LBC/IRN radio, since then she has been a political, current affairs and arts reporter. Martha has presented on BBC’s Woman’s Hour, On The Record, Panorama and Newsnight where she made films inside Holloway prison and with drug addicts in Glasgow as well as reporting from India, Pakistan and Nicaragua.As a presenter, Martha’s interview history ranges widely and includes Amy Winehouse, Hilary Mantel, Tracey Emin, Cornelia Parker and Jane Fonda. Martha has covered every UK election since 1987 and interviewed every British Prime Minister since, she has also covered every US election since 1988 interviewing many American politicians including Hillary Clinton, Condoleezza Rice, John McCain, Nancy Pelosi and Bob Dole. Martha was nominated for a BAFTA for covering the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Her television work includes documentaries on The Good Friday Agreement, Jane Austen, Lewis Carroll, the Bronte sisters, Great Irish Journeys and several series about the honey bee and one about the Painted Lady butterfly.

Shahidha Bari

Shahidha Bari is an academic, broadcaster and writer, working in philosophy and the arts. She is Professor of Culture at London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London. She presents BBC Radio 3’s Free Thinking and occasionally hosts BBC Radio 4’s Front Row. She writes for The Guardian, the TLS and Frieze magazine amongst others. Her latest book is Dressed: The Secret Life of Clothes.

Simon Ings

Simon Ings is a novelist, critic, and writer of non-fiction. He wrote science fiction novels in his twenties before widening brief to explore perception (The Eye), 20th-century radical politics (The Weight of Numbers), the shipping system (Dead Water) and augmented reality (Wolves). He co-founded and edited Arc magazine, a digital publication about art, design and technology, before joining New Scientist magazine as its arts editor. Simon's latest non-fiction, Stalin and the Scientists (Faber, 2016) was longlisted for the 2016 Baillie Gifford Prize. The Smoke, his most recent novel, was published by Gollancz in 2018. A big reprint anthology, We Robots, for Head of Zeus, is to be published towards the end of 2020. He contributes to the FT, Times, Telegraph and the Spectator while writing a book about writers and political power and planning his next novel sequence.

Leo Robson

Leo Robson is a contributing writer at the New Statesman, where he writes regularly on fiction and literature. He was awarded the prize for Best Arts+ Culture Story at the 2019 Foreign Press Association Awards. He has served as a judge on the Booker Prize, among other awards.

Max Strasser

Max Strasser is the London-based international opinion editor for The New York Times, where he oversees the Opinion department's coverage of world news and the Op-Ed pages of The New York Times International Edition. Prior to joining The Times, Max was an editor at Foreign Policy magazine in Washington D.C. He has reported from Egypt, Turkey, Bosnia, Britain and the United States and his writing has appeared online or in print in The Nation, Foreign Affairs, the London Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review and elsewhere.

Bee Wilson

Bee Wilson is a food writer and the author of six books on food-related subjects including First Bite and Consider the Fork. She writes about food and other subjects for a wide range of publications including The Guardian and The Wall Street Journal. Her most recent book is The Way We Eat Now, which was published in 2019.