# Baillie Gifford Prize

The Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction, formerly the Samuel Johnson Prize, is an annual British book prize for the best non-fiction writing in the English language. It was founded in 1999 following the demise of the NCR Book Award. With its motto "All the best stories are true", the prize covers current affairs, history, politics, science, sport, travel, biography, autobiography and the arts. The competition is open to authors of any nationality whose work is published in the UK in English. The longlist, shortlist and winner is chosen by a panel of independent judges, which changes every year. Formerly named after English author and lexicographer Samuel Johnson, the award was renamed in 2015 after Baillie Gifford, an investment management firm and the primary sponsor. Since 2016, the annual dinner and awards ceremony has been sponsored by the Blavatnik Family Foundation.
The prize is governed by the Board of Directors of The Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-fiction Limited, a not-for-profit company. Since 2018, the Chair of the Board has been Sir Peter Bazalgette, who succeeded Stuart Proffitt, the chair since 1999. In 2015, Toby Mundy was appointed as the Prize's first director.

## History

Prior to the establishment of the Samuel Johnson Prize, Britain's premier literary award for non-fiction was the NCR Book Award, which had been established in 1987. In 1997, the NCR Award experienced a scandal when it was revealed the judges, many of them chosen for their popularity rather than literary qualities, had used "ghost readers" and were not expected to read the books they voted on. Because of this and other problems the award ceased operations. In response, one of the previous winners of NCR Award, the historian Peter Hennessy, approached Stuart Proffitt, a Publishing Director at Penguin Press, with the idea for a new award. An anonymous benefactor was found who funded the establishment of the Prize, which was named after the English 18th-century author and lexicographer Samuel Johnson.
From its inception until 2001, the prize was independently financed by the founding benefactor. In 2002, it was taken over by the BBC and re-named the BBC Four Samuel Johnson Prize and managed by BBC Four. In 2009, the name was amended to the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction and managed by BBC Two. The new name reflected the BBC's commitment to broadcasting coverage of the Prize on the BBC2 programme, The Culture Show. In 2016, the name was changed to the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction, after its new primary sponsor, the Edinburgh-based investment management company Baillie Gifford.
Prior to the 2009 name change, the winner received £30,000, and each finalist received £2,500. After 2009, the award was £20,000 for the winner, and each finalist received £1,000. In February 2012, the steering committee for the prize announced that a new sponsor had been found for the prize, an anonymous philanthropist, enabling the prize money to be raised to £25,000. In 2015, funding for the prize was arranged by the Blavatnik Family Foundation, while the organisers sought new primary sponsors from 2016 onwards.
In 2016, under new sponsors Baillie Gifford, the prize money was restored to £30,000 for the winner.
In 2019, following the announcement that Baillie Gifford will sponsor the award until at least 2026, the prize money was increased to £50,000.
It is widely recognised as the UK's most prestigious award for non-fiction authors.

## Winners and shortlists
### 1990s

1990s Samuel Johnson Prize winners and shortlists :
| Year | Author | Title | Result |
| 1999 | Antony Beevor | Stalingrad | Won |
| 1999 | Ian Kershaw | Hitler 1889–1936: Hubris (about Adolf Hitler) | Shortlisted |
| 1999 | Ann Wroe | Pilate: The Biography of an Invented Man (about Pontius Pilate) | Shortlisted |
| 1999 | John Diamond | C: Because Cowards Get Cancer Too | Shortlisted |
| 1999 | Richard Holmes | Coleridge: Darker Reflections (about Samuel Taylor Coleridge) | Shortlisted |
| 1999 | David Landes | The Wealth and Poverty of Nations | Shortlisted |

### 2000s

2000s Samuel Johnson Prize winners and shortlists :
| Year | Author | Title | Result |
| 2000 | David Cairns | Berlioz: Volume 2 | Won |
| 2000 | Tony Hawks | Playing the Moldovans at Tennis | Shortlisted |
| 2000 | Brenda Maddox | Yeats's Ghosts: The Secret Life of W. B. Yeats (about W. B. Yeats) | Shortlisted |
| 2000 | Matt Ridley | Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters | Shortlisted |
| 2000 | William Shawcross | Deliver us from Evil: Warlords, Peacekeepers and a World of Endless Conflict | Shortlisted |
| 2000 | Francis Wheen | Karl Marx (about Karl Marx) | Shortlisted |
| 2001 | Michael Burleigh | The Third Reich: A New History | Won |
| 2001 | Richard Fortey | Trilobite!: Eyewitness to Evolution | Shortlisted |
| 2001 | Catherine Merridale | Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Russia | Shortlisted |
| 2001 | Graham Robb | Rimbaud (about Arthur Rimbaud) | Shortlisted |
| 2001 | Simon Sebag Montefiore | Prince of Princes: The Life of Potemkin (about Grigory Potemkin) | Shortlisted |
| 2001 | Robert Skidelsky | John Maynard Keynes: Fighting for Britain, 1937–1946 (about John Maynard Keynes) | Shortlisted |
| 2002 | Margaret MacMillan | Peacemakers: The Paris Peace Conference of 1919 and Its Attempt to End War | Won |
| 2002 | Eamon Duffy | The Voices of Morebath: Reformation and Rebellion in an English Village | Shortlisted |
| 2002 | William Fiennes | The Snow Geese | Shortlisted |
| 2002 | Richard Hamblyn | The Invention of Clouds: How an Amateur Meteorologist Forged the Language of the Skies | Shortlisted |
| 2002 | Roy Jenkins | Churchill: a Biography (about Winston Churchill) | Shortlisted |
| 2002 | Brendan Simms | Unfinest Hour: Britain and the Destruction of Bosnia | Shortlisted |
| 2003 | T. J. Binyon | Pushkin: A Biography (about Alexander Pushkin) | Won |
| 2003 | Orlando Figes | Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia | Shortlisted |
| 2003 | Aminatta Forna | The Devil that Danced on the Water: A Daughter's Memoir of her Father, her Family, her Country and a Continent | Shortlisted |
| 2003 | Olivia Judson | Dr Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation: The Definitive Guide to the Evolutionary Biology of Sex | Shortlisted |
| 2003 | Claire Tomalin | Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self | Shortlisted |
| 2003 | Edgar Vincent | Nelson: Love and Fame (about Lord Nelson) | Shortlisted |
| 2004 | Anna Funder | Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall | Won |
| 2004 | Anne Applebaum | Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps | Shortlisted |
| 2004 | Jonathan Bate | John Clare: A Biography (about John Clare) | Shortlisted |
| 2004 | Bill Bryson | A Short History of Nearly Everything | Shortlisted |
| 2004 | Aidan Hartley | The Zanzibar Chest: A Memoir of Love and War | Shortlisted |
| 2004 | Tom Holland | Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic | Shortlisted |
| 2005 | Jonathan Coe | Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of B. S. Johnson (about B. S. Johnson) | Won |
| 2005 | Alexander Masters | Stuart: A Life Backwards | Shortlisted |
| 2005 | Suketu Mehta | Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found | Shortlisted |
| 2005 | Orhan Pamuk | Istanbul: Memories and the City | Shortlisted |
| 2005 | Hilary Spurling | Matisse the Master: The Conquest of Colour 1909–1954 (about Henri Matisse) | Shortlisted |
| 2005 | Sarah Wise | The Italian Boy: Murder and Grave-Robbery in 1830s London | Shortlisted |
| 2006 | James S. Shapiro | 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare | Won |
| 2006 | Alan Bennett | Untold Stories | Shortlisted |
| 2006 | Jerry Brotton | The Sale of the Late King's Goods: Charles I and His Art Collection | Shortlisted |
| 2006 | Carmen Callil | Bad Faith: A Forgotten History of Family & Fatherland | Shortlisted |
| 2006 | Tony Judt | Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 | Shortlisted |
| 2006 | Tom Reiss | The Orientalist: In Search of a Man Caught Between East and West | Shortlisted |
| 2007 | Rajiv Chandrasekaran | Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone | Won |
| 2007 | Ian Buruma | Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo Van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance | Shortlisted |
| 2007 | Peter Hennessy | Having It So Good: Britain in the Fifties | Shortlisted |
| 2007 | Georgina Howell | Daughter of the Desert: The Extraordinary Life of Gertrude Bell (about Gertrude Bell) | Shortlisted |
| 2007 | Dominic Streatfeild | Brainwash: The Secret History of Mind Control | Shortlisted |
| 2007 | Adrian Tinniswood | The Verneys: A True Story of Love, War, and Madness in Seventeenth-Century England | Shortlisted |
| 2008 | Kate Summerscale | The Suspicions of Mr Whicher or the Murder at Road Hill House | Won |
| 2008 | Tim Butcher | Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart | Shortlisted |
| 2008 | Mark Cocker | Crow Country | Shortlisted |
| 2008 | Orlando Figes | The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia | Shortlisted |
| 2008 | Patrick French | The World Is What It Is: The Authorised Biography of VS Naipaul (about V. S. Naipaul) | Shortlisted |
| 2008 | Alex Ross | The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century | Shortlisted |
| 2009 | Philip Hoare | Leviathan or, The Whale | Won |
| 2009 | Liaquat Ahamed | Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World | Shortlisted |
| 2009 | Ben Goldacre | Bad Science | Shortlisted |
| 2009 | David Grann | The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon | Shortlisted |
| 2009 | Richard Holmes | The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science | Shortlisted |
| 2009 | Manjit Kumar | Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate about the Nature of Reality | Shortlisted |

### 2010s

2010s Baillie Gifford Prize winner and shortlist :
| Year | Author | Title | Result |
| 2010 | Barbara Demick | Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea | Won |
| 2010 | Alex Bellos | Alex's Adventures in Numberland: Dispatches from the Wonderful World of Mathematics | Shortlisted |
| 2010 | Luke Jennings | Blood Knots: On Fathers, Friendship and Fishing | Shortlisted |
| 2010 | Andrew Ross Sorkin | Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System—and Themselves | Shortlisted |
| 2010 | Jenny Uglow | A Gambling Man: Charles II and the Restoration | Shortlisted |
| 2010 | Richard Wrangham | Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human | Shortlisted |
| 2011 | Frank Dikötter | Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958–1962 | Won |
| 2011 | Andrew Graham-Dixon | Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane (biography of Caravaggio) | Shortlisted |
| 2011 | Maya Jasanoff | Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World | Shortlisted |
| 2011 | Matt Ridley | The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves | Shortlisted |
| 2011 | Jonathan Steinberg | Bismarck: A Life (biography of Otto von Bismarck) | Shortlisted |
| 2011 | John Stubbs | Reprobates: The Cavaliers of the English Civil War | Shortlisted |
| 2012 | Wade Davis | Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest | Won |
| 2012 | Katherine Boo | Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Slum | Shortlisted |
| 2012 | Robert Macfarlane | The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot | Shortlisted |
| 2012 | Steven Pinker | The Better Angels of our Nature: A History of Violence and Humanity | Shortlisted |
| 2012 | Paul Preston | The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain | Shortlisted |
| 2012 | Sue Prideaux | Strindberg: A Life (about August Strindberg) | Shortlisted |
| 2013 | Lucy Hughes-Hallett | The Pike: Gabriele D'Annunzio, Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War | Won |
| 2013 | David Crane | Empires of the Dead: How One Man's Vision led to the Creation of WWI's World Graves | Shortlisted |
| 2013 | William Dalrymple | Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan | Shortlisted |
| 2013 | Dave Goulson | A Sting in the Tale: My Adventures with Bumblebees | Shortlisted |
| 2013 | Charlotte Higgins | Under Another Sky: Journeys in Roman Britain | Shortlisted |
| 2013 | Charles Moore | Margaret Thatcher: The Authorised Biography | Shortlisted |
| 2014 | Helen Macdonald | H Is for Hawk | Won |
| 2014 | John Campbell | Roy Jenkins: A Biography (about Roy Jenkins) | Shortlisted |
| 2014 | Marion Coutts | The Iceberg: A Memoir | Shortlisted |
| 2014 | Greg Grandin | The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World | Shortlisted |
| 2014 | Alison Light | Common People: The History of an English Family | Shortlisted |
| 2014 | Caroline Moorehead | Village of Secrets: Defying the Nazis in Vichy France | Shortlisted |
| 2015 | Steve Silberman | NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and How to Think Smarter About People Who Think Differently | Won |
| 2015 | Jonathan Bate | Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life (about Ted Hughes) | Shortlisted |
| 2015 | Robert Macfarlane | Landmarks | Shortlisted |
| 2015 | Laurence Scott | The Four-Dimensional Human: Ways of Being in the Digital World | Shortlisted |
| 2015 | Emma Sky | The Unravelling: High Hopes and Missed Opportunities in Iraq | Shortlisted |
| 2015 | Samanth Subramanian | This Divided Island: Stories from the Sri Lankan Civil War | Shortlisted |
| 2016 | Philippe Sands | East West Street: On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity | Won |
| 2016 | Svetlana Alexievich | Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets | Shortlisted |
| 2016 | Margo Jefferson | Negroland: A Memoir | Shortlisted |
| 2016 | Hisham Matar | The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between | Shortlisted |
| 2017 | David France | How to Survive a Plague: The Inside Story of How Citizens and Science Tamed AIDS | Won |
| 2017 | Christopher de Bellaigue | The Islamic Enlightenment The Modern Struggle Between Faith and Reason | Shortlisted |
| 2017 | Kapka Kassabova | Border: A Journey to he Edge of Europe | Shortlisted |
| 2017 | Daniel Mendelsohn | An Odyssey: A Father, a Son and an Epic | Shortlisted |
| 2017 | Mark O'Connell | To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death | Shortlisted |
| 2017 | Simon Schama | Belonging: The Story of the Jews, 1492–1900 | Shortlisted |
| 2018 | Serhii Plokhy | Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy | Won |
| 2018 | Hannah Fry | Hello World: How to Be Human in the Age of the Machine | Shortlisted |
| 2018 | Ben Macintyre | The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War | Shortlisted |
| 2018 | Thomas Page McBee | Amateur: A True Story About What Makes a Man | Shortlisted |
| 2018 | Stephen R. Platt | Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China's Last Golden Age | Shortlisted |
| 2018 | Carl Zimmer | She Has Her Mother's Laugh: The Powers, Perversions and Potential of Heredity | Shortlisted |
| 2019 | Hallie Rubenhold | The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper | Won |
| 2019 | Casey Cep | Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud and the Last Trial of Harper Lee | Shortlisted |
| 2019 | Laura Cumming | On Chapel Sands: My Mother and Other Missing Persons | Shortlisted |
| 2019 | William Feaver | The Lives of Lucian Freud: Youth (about Lucian Freud) | Shortlisted |
| 2019 | Julia Lovell | Maoism: A Global History | Shortlisted |
| 2019 | Azadeh Moaveni | Guest House for Young Widows: Among the Women of ISIS | Shortlisted |

### 2020s

2020s Baillie Gifford Prize winner and shortlist :
| Year | Author | Title | Result |
| 2020 | Craig Brown | One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time | Won |
| 2020 | Matthew Cobb | The Idea of the Brain: A History | Shortlisted |
| 2020 | Sudhir Hazareesingh | Black Spartacus: The Epic Life of Toussaint Louverture | Shortlisted |
| 2020 | Christina Lamb | Our Bodies, Their Battlefield: What War Does to Women | Shortlisted |
| 2020 | Amy Stanley | Stranger in the Shogun's City: A Japanese Woman and Her World | Shortlisted |
| 2020 | Kate Summerscale | The Haunting of Alma Fielding: A True Ghost Story | Shortlisted |
| 2021 | Patrick Radden Keefe | Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty | Won |
| 2021 | Cal Flyn | Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape | Shortlisted |
| 2021 | Harald Jähner | Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945–1955 | Shortlisted |
| 2021 | Kei Miller | Things I Have Withheld | Shortlisted |
| 2021 | John Preston | Fall: The Mystery of Robert Maxwell (about Robert Maxwell) | Shortlisted |
| 2021 | Lea Ypi | Free: Coming of Age at the End of History | Shortlisted |
| 2022 | Katherine Rundell | Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne (about John Donne) | Won |
| 2022 | Caroline Elkins | Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire | Shortlisted |
| 2022 | Jonathan Freedland | The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World | Shortlisted |
| 2022 | Sally Hayden | My Fourth Time, We Drowned: Seeking Refuge on the World's Deadliest Migration Route | Shortlisted |
| 2022 | Anna Keay | The Restless Republic: Britain Without a Crown | Shortlisted |
| 2022 | Polly Morland | A Fortunate Woman: A Country Doctor’s Story | Shortlisted |
| 2023 | John Vaillant | Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World | Won |
| 2023 | Hannah Barnes | Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock's Gender Service for Children | Shortlisted |
| 2023 | Tania Branigan | Red Memory: Living, Remembering and Forgetting China's Cultural Revolution, | Shortlisted |
| 2023 | Christopher Clark | Revolutionary Spring: Fighting for a New World 1848–1849 | Shortlisted |
| 2023 | Jeremy Eichler | Time's Echo: The Second World War, The Holocaust, and The Music of Remembrance | Shortlisted |
| 2023 | Jennifer Homans | Mr. B: George Balanchine's Twentieth Century | Shortlisted |
| 2024 | Richard Flanagan | Question 7 | Won |
| 2024 | Rachel Clarke | The Story of a Heart | Shortlisted |
| 2024 | Annie Jacobsen | Nuclear War: A Scenario | Shortlisted |
| 2024 | Viet Thanh Nguyen | A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, a History, a Memorial | Shortlisted |
| 2024 | Sue Prideaux | Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin | Shortlisted |
| 2024 | David Van Reybrouck | Revolusi: Indonesia and the Birth of the Modern World | Shortlisted |

### 25th Anniversary Winner of Winners Award

In 2023, marking the 25th anniversary of the prize, a one-off 'Winner of Winners' Award was announced. The judging panel was chaired by Jason Cowley (New Statesman editor-in-chief) and included Shahidha Bari (academic, critic and broadcaster), Sarah Churchwell (journalist, author and academic), and Frances Wilson (biographer and critic).
| Author | Title | Win Year | Result |
| James S. Shapiro | 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare | 2006 | Won |
| Craig Brown | One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time | 2020 | Shortlisted |
| Wade Davis | Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest | 2012 | Shortlisted |
| Barbara Demick | Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea | 2010 | Shortlisted |
| Patrick Radden Keefe | Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty | 2021 | Shortlisted |
| Margaret MacMillan | Peacemakers: The Paris Peace Conference of 1919 and Its Attempt to End War | 2002 | Shortlisted |