# Guardian First Book Award

The Guardian First Book Award was a literary award presented by The Guardian newspaper. It annually recognised one book by a new writer. It was established in 1999, replacing the Guardian Fiction Award or Guardian Fiction Prize that the newspaper had sponsored from 1965. The Guardian First Book Award was discontinued in 2016, with the 2015 awards being the last.

## History

The newspaper determined to change its book award after 1998, and during that year also hired Claire Armitstead as literary editor. At the inaugural First Book Award ceremony in 1999, she said that she was informed of the change, details to be arranged, by the head of the marketing department during her second week on the job. "By the time we left the room we had decided on two key things. We would make it a first book award, and we would involve reading groups in the judging process. This was going to be the people's prize." About the opening of the prize to nonfiction she had said in August, "readers do not segregate their reading into fiction or non-fiction, so neither should we." There was no restriction on genre; for example, both poetry and travel would be included in principle, and so would self-published autobiographies.
For the first rendition, 140 books were submitted, including a lot of nonfiction strongest "by far" in "a hybrid of travel-writing and reportage"; weak in science and biography. Experts led by Armitstead selected a longlist of 11 and Borders in Glasgow, London, Brighton and Leeds hosted reading groups that considered one book a week, September to November, and selected a shortlist of six. A panel of eight judges including two Guardian editors chose the winner. The newspaper called it "the first time the ordinary reading public have been involved in the selection of a major literary prize." In the event, the 1999 reading groups selected a shortlist including six novels, and all four groups favoured the novel Ghostwritten by David Mitchell. Their second favourite was one of the travelogue and reporting hybrids, by Philip Gourevitch of The New Yorker. The judges chose the latter, We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families —"a horrifying but humane account of the Rwandan genocide, its causes and consequences", the newspaper called it in August.
The prize was worth £10,000 to the winner. Eligible titles were published in English, and in the UK within the calendar year.

## Winners and finalists

Guardian First Book Award winners and finalists, 2010-2019 :
| Year | Author | Title | Result |
| 1999 | Philip Gourevitch | We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families | Winner |
| 1999 | Bella Bathurst | Lighthouse Stevensons | Finalist |
| 1999 | Raj Kamal Jha | The Blue Bedspread | Finalist |
| 1999 | Daren King | Boxy an Star | Finalist |
| 1999 | David Mitchell | Ghostwritten | Finalist |
| 1999 | Gary Younge | No Place Like Home | Finalist |
| 2000 | Zadie Smith | White Teeth | Winner |
| 2000 | Mark Z. Danielewski | House of Leaves | Finalist |
| 2000 | Dave Eggers | A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius | Finalist |
| 2000 | Naomi Klein | No Logo | Finalist |
| 2000 | Andrew X. Pham | Catfish and Mandala: a Vietnamese Odyssey | Finalist |
| 2001 | Chris Ware | Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth | Winner |
| 2001 | Miranda Carter | Anthony Blunt: His Lives | Finalist |
| 2001 | David Edmonds and John Eidinow | Wittgenstein's Poker: The Story of a Ten-Minute Argument Between Two Great Philosophers | Finalist |
| 2001 | Glen David Gold | Carter Beats the Devil | Finalist |
| 2001 | Rachel Seiffert | The Dark Room | Finalist |
| 2002 | Jonathan Safran Foer | Everything Is Illuminated | Winner |
| 2002 | Alexandra Fuller | Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight | Finalist |
| 2002 | Hari Kunzru | The Impressionist | Finalist |
| 2002 | Oliver Morton | Mapping Mars | Finalist |
| 2002 | Sandra Newman | The Only Good Thing Anyone Has Ever Done | Finalist |
| 2003 | Robert Macfarlane | Mountains of the Mind | Winner |
| 2003 | Monica Ali | Brick Lane | Finalist |
| 2003 | Paul Broks | Into the Silent Land | Finalist |
| 2003 | Anna Funder | Stasiland | Finalist |
| 2003 | DBC Pierre | Vernon God Little | Finalist |
| 2004 | Armand Marie Leroi | Mutants: On the Form, Varieties and Errors of Human Body | Winner |
| 2004 | David Bezmozgis | Natasha and Other Stories | Finalist |
| 2004 | Susanna Clarke | Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell | Finalist |
| 2004 | Matthew Hollis | Ground Water | Finalist |
| 2004 | Rory Stewart | The Places in Between | Finalist |
| 2005 | Alexander Masters | Stuart: A Life Backwards | Winner |
| 2005 | Reza Aslan | No god but God | Finalist |
| 2005 | Richard Benson | The Farm | Finalist |
| 2005 | Rattawut Lapcharoensap | Sightseeing | Finalist |
| 2005 | Suketu Mehta | Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found | Finalist |
| 2006 | Yiyun Li | A Thousand Years of Good Prayers | Winner |
| 2006 | Lorraine Adams | Harbor | Finalist |
| 2006 | Clare Allan | Poppy Shakespeare | Finalist |
| 2006 | Hisham Matar | In the Country of Men | Finalist |
| 2006 | Carrie Tiffany | Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living | Finalist |
| 2007 | Dinaw Mengestu | Children of the Revolution | Winner |
| 2007 | Tahmima Anam | A Golden Age | Finalist |
| 2007 | Rajiv Chandrasekaran | Imperial Life in the Emerald City | Finalist |
| 2007 | Rosemary Hill | God's Architect | Finalist |
| 2007 | Catherine O'Flynn | What Was Lost | Finalist |
| 2008 | Alex Ross | The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the 20th Century | Winner |
| 2008 | Mohammed Hanif | A Case of Exploding Mangoes | Finalist |
| 2008 | Owen Matthews | Stalin's Children | Finalist |
| 2008 | Ross Raisin | God's Own Country | Finalist |
| 2008 | Steve Toltz | A Fraction of the Whole | Finalist |
| 2009 | Petina Gappah | An Elegy for Easterly | Winner |
| 2009 | Eleanor Catton | The Rehearsal | Finalist |
| 2009 | Samantha Harvey | The Wilderness | Finalist |
| 2009 | Reif Larsen | The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet | Finalist |
| 2009 | Michael Peel | A Swamp Full of Dollars | Finalist |
| 2010 | Alexandra Harris | Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper | Winner |
| 2010 | Ned Beauman | Boxer, Beetle | Finalist |
| 2010 | Maile Chapman | Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto | Finalist |
| 2010 | Nadifa Mohamed | Black Mamba Boy | Finalist |
| 2010 | Kathryn Schulz | In Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error | Finalist |
| 2011 | Siddhartha Mukherjee | The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer | Winner |
| 2011 | Stephen Kelman | Pigeon English | Finalist |
| 2011 | Juan Pablo Villalobos | Down The Rabbit Hole | Finalist |
| 2011 | Mirza Waheed | The Collaborator | Finalist |
| 2011 | Amy Waldman | The Submission | Finalist |
| 2012 | Kevin Powers | The Yellow Birds | Winner |
| 2012 | Katherine Boo | Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity | Finalist |
| 2012 | Chad Harbach | The Art of Fielding | Finalist |
| 2012 | Lindsey Hilsum | Sandstorm: Libya in the Time of Revolution | Finalist |
| 2012 | Kerry Hudson | Tony Hogan Bought Me an Ice-cream Float Before He Stole My Ma | Finalist |
| 2013 | Donal Ryan | The Spinning Heart | Winner |
| 2013 | NoViolet Bulawayo | We Need New Names | Finalist |
| 2013 | Shereen El Feki | Sex and the Citadel | Finalist |
| 2013 | Hannah Kent | Burial Rites | Finalist |
| 2013 | Lottie Moggach | Kiss Me First | Finalist |
| 2014 | Colin Barrett | Young Skins | Winner |
| 2014 | Henry Marsh | Do No Harm | Finalist |
| 2014 | Fiona McFarlane | The Night Guest | Finalist |
| 2014 | Evan Osnos | Age of Ambition | Finalist |
| 2014 | May-Lan Tan | Things to Make and Break | Finalist |
| 2015 | Andrew McMillan | Physical | Winner |
| 2015 | Diane Cook | Man v Nature | Finalist |
| 2015 | Chigozie Obioma | The Fishermen | Finalist |
| 2015 | Peter Pomerantsev | Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible | Finalist |
| 2015 | Max Porter | Grief Is the Thing with Feathers | Finalist |
| 2015 | Sara Taylor | The Shore | Finalist |