Take a look at these great titles shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize, the UK’s premier annual prize for non-fiction books!
The Baillie Gifford Prize rewards excellence in non-fiction writing, bringing the best in intelligent reflection on the world to new readers. It covers all non-fiction in the areas of current affairs, history, politics, science, sport, travel, biography, autobiography and the arts.
Want more suggested books? Take a look at our recommendations.
Baldwin: A Love Story
Nicholas Boggs
The first major biography of James Baldwin in three decades, this book reveals how profoundly the writer’s personal relationships shaped his life and work.
Drawing on archival material and original research and interviews, Nicholas Boggs tells the overlapping stories of Baldwin’s most sustaining intimate and artistic relationships.
With his mentor, the Black American painter Beauford Delaney; with his lover and muse, the Swiss painter Lucien Happersberger; and with his collaborators, the famed Turkish actor Engin Cezzar and the iconoclastic French artist Yoran Cazac, whose long-overlooked significance as Baldwin’s last great love is explored in these pages for the first time.
Days of Love and Rage: A Story of Revolution
Anand Gopal
In 2011, in a city in northern Syria, the people began a movement that aimed to remake their country after decades of brutal dictatorship. For the next eighteen months, citizens of Manbij carried out one of the most remarkable experiments in democracy in modern times.
‘Days of Love and Rage’ tells the story of the Syrian revolution, from its early days through the overthrow of the Assad regime, in microcosm. Anand Gopal immerses us in the world of a single city through the intimate narratives of the men and women who led the struggle.
Through mesmerising and moving stories, we experience the highs of camaraderie and the lows of betrayal: a pair of best friends torn apart by political polarisation, a mother who stands up to male dominance, a worker who risks everything for the dream of equality.
Transcending the particulars of one terrible conflict, this sweeping narrative is, above all, an account of the best and worst of humanity.
London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City, and a Family’s Search for Truth
Patrick Radden Keefe
In 2019, a London teenager, Zac Brettler, mysteriously fell to his death from a luxury apartment building on the banks of the Thames.
When his grieving parents began their desperate quest to understand how their son had died, they made a terrible discovery: Zac had been leading a fantasy life, posing as the son of a wealthy Russian oligarch.
In his inimitably gripping and forensic prose, Baillie Gifford Prize winner and New Yorker writer Patrick Radden Keefe follows Zac’s parents on a dark journey to find out what brought Zac to the balcony that night – and how a teenager’s world of make-believe drew him into the city’s terrifying underworld.
Alexander: God, King, Man
Edmund Richardson
In 336 BCE, at the age of twenty, Alexander, a wide-eyed boy from the hills of Macedon, inherited a tumbledown kingdom, a pile of debts and an army which answered to nobody.
Desperate to hold on to power, he led the army east, into the heart of the vast Persian Empire, and inadvertently began the greatest military campaign in history.
The young man became a king, the king became a hero, the hero became a living god, and the god died aged thirty-two, broken-hearted in Babylon. For centuries, historians have told his story, yet Alexander has remained a mystery.
But now, the ruins of his cities have emerged from the bottom of the sea and the dust of Central Asian hillsides. The diaries of Babylonian astronomers who knew him have been deciphered. The tombs of his ancestors have been unearthed. For the first time, instead of the legend, we can meet Alexander the man.
The Traveller: The Revolutionary Life of George Forster and His Search for Humanity
Andrea Wulf
‘The Traveller’ spreads out before us the life and times of George Forster, who journeyed to the far reaches of the known world, and whose radical ideas about humanity, equality and freedom challenged the worldviews of 18th-century Europe.
Andrea Wulf paints a picture of a man of profound curiosity and brilliance. He joined Cook’s second voyage at the age of 17, an exploration of vast contrasts from the icy world of Antarctica to tropical islands of the South Pacific.
Studying the diverse nature, peoples and cultures he encountered, he came back imbued with a deep belief in the equality of races – an understanding far ahead of his time. On his return he was feted in England, France, Germany and Poland, using his fame to advocate for freedom and women’s rights and against empire, racism and slavery.
The Great Dictator: A Life of Barbara Cartland
Matthew Sweet
Penniless virgins. Reckless dukes. Flappers. Airmen. Suffragettes. Barbara Cartland made them fall in love. She wrote 723 books without touching a typewriter: instead, she reclined on her sofa with a Pekinese on her lap – and romantic fiction billowed out of her.
This biography reveals the woman behind the powder and mascara – a clever, socially precarious writer navigating a twentieth-century world of war-damaged men, class conflict and sexual peril. After 49 proposals, she chose the wrong one. What followed was a life stranger than any of her novels.
From country house weekends to Fleet Street offices, from Mayfair bedrooms to the divorce court, Matthew Sweet traces Cartland’s extraordinary journey through a century of upheaval. Here are terrorist plots, psychic seances, suppressed scandals, plagiarism battles in the cutthroat world of romance publishing – and a surprising turn as a campaigner for Romany rights.
Portuguese 
English 
Polish 
Lithuanian 
Romanian 
Bengali