The Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction has revealed its shortlist, with six authors in contention for the U.K. literary award.
Helen Garner was named a finalist for How To End a Story: Collected Diaries, 1978-1998, alongside Adam Weymouth for Lone Wolf: Walking the Line Between Civilization and Wildness and Justin Marozzi for Captives and Companions: A History of Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Islamic World.
Jason Burke made the shortlist for The Revolutionists: The Story of the Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970s, as did Richard Holmes for The Boundless Deep: Young Tennyson, Science, and the Crisis of Belief and Frances Wilson for Electric Spark: The Enigma of Dame Muriel.
Robbie Millen, the chair of judges for the award, said in a statement, “Formidable female novelists, ghastly literary men, a faith-shaken poet, eunuchs, pirates, horny wolves, international terrorists. This is who the judges have been spending time with. And what good company.…It’s a shortlist that will be bold company in the darkening autumn evenings.”
The Baillie Gifford Prize was established in 1999. Previous winners include Antony Beevor for Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege: 1942-1943, Kate Summerscale for The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective, and Richard Flanagan for Question 7.
The winner of this year’s award, which comes with a cash prize of 50,000 British pounds, about $67,000, will be announced on November 4.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
