Image: Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction
By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson
‘Creativity, Critical Thinking, and Great Writing’
The jury of the 2024 Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction started with a pool of 349 books published between November 1 of last year and October 31 of this year. The longlist of 12 titles released this morning in London (September 5) includes the debut publication of one author, Rachel Cockerell, as well as the work of one Pulitzer Prize winner, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and works of two Booker Prize winners, Richard Flanagan and Salman Rushdie. (See our Wednesday article here on Rushdie’s upcoming receipt of Iceland’s Halldór Laxness International Literary Prize.)
With a shortlist of six books expected on October 10 at England’s public-facing Cheltenham Literature Festival, this year’s Baillie Gifford Prize cycle is to conclude on November 19 with its winner announcement.
That winner is to receive £50,000 (US$65,715) and the other shortlisted authors are to be given £5,000 each (US$6,569), bringing the total value of this year’s purse to a particularly handsome £75,000 (US$98,572).
Toby Mundy
And of special interest to many Publishing Perspectives readers, the Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction is the book award regime the executive director of which—Toby Mundy, CEO of Aevitas Creative Management Limited—announced to us last November that it will follow the Booker Foundation’s lead and begin reporting indications of what impact their highest honors can confer in the marketplace.
This means that, much as the Booker does, Mundy’s Baillie Gifford team—at a time interval of its own choosing—will inform various news media of the sales impact a title has encountered following its announcement as the winner. As more prize contests attach to the book business each year, particularly in the United Kingdom’s awards-avid market, it has become increasingly important for those competitions to demonstrate their value to the industry and to consumers—rather than asking the industry and the reading public to simply take it on faith that a book’s sales will soar purely on the strength of a “golden sticker” being affixed to its cover at a bookstore.
The Baillie Gifford actually has a fine track record in its sales impact on winning titles int he marketplace, and we look forward to seeing how this year’s eventual winner will fare.
Known from 1999 to 2015 as the Samuel Johnson Prize for Nonfiction, the Baillie Gifford is open to books in current affairs, history, politics, science, sport, travel, biography, autobiography, and the arts. Not unlike the Cundill History Prize; the British Academy Book Prize (also expected to start reporting sales impact for winners); the issue-driven Aspen Words Literary Prize in the States, and several other programs in nonfiction, an emphasis here is on readable interpretations of current affairs, often with historical perspective.
The Baillie Gifford Prize 2024 Longlist
For our internationalist readership, a note that the publishers listed here are the UK publishers of the Baillie Gifford’s longlisted titles. In cases of books originally published in other markets before being released in the United Kingdom, you may have encountered a title as another publisher’s release and in an earlier year.
| Author, Translator (Nationality) | Title | Publisher and/or Imprint |
| Gary J. Bass (American) | Judgement at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia |
Pan Macmillan / Picador |
| Jonathan Blitzer (American) | Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis |
Pan Macmillan / Picador |
| Rachel Clarke (British) | The Story of a Heart | Hachette UK / Little, Brown / Abacus |
| Rachel Cockerell (British) | Melting Point: Family, Memory and the Search for a Promised Land |
Hachette UK / Headline / Wildfire |
| Richard Flanagan (Australian) | Question 7 | Penguin Random House / Vintage / Chatto & Windus |
| Annie Jacobsen (American) | Nuclear War: A Scenario | Penguin Random House / Transworld / Torva |
| Viet Thanh Nguyen (Vietnamese-American) |
A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, A History, A Memorial | Hachette UK / Little, Brown / Corsair |
| Sue Prideaux (British) | Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin | Faber & Faber |
| David Van Reybrouck (Belgian) Translated by David Colmer and David McKay |
Revolusi: Indonesia and the Birth of the Modern World | Penguin Random House / Vintage / The Bodley Head |
| Salman Rushdie (British- American) |
Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder | Penguin Random House / Vintage / Jonathan Cape |
| Helen Scales (British) | What the Wild Sea Can Be: The Future of the World’s Ocean |
Atlantic Books / Grove Atlantic / Grove Press UK |
| Adam Shatz (American) | The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon | Bloomsbury / Head of Zeus / Apollo |
Jury Commentary
This year’s jury panel comprises:
- Isabel Hilton (chair), journalist, broadcaster, and founder of China Dialogue
- Heather Brooke, author and investigative journalist
- Alison Flood, comment and culture editor for New Scientist
- Peter Hoskin, culture editor of Prospect
- Tomiwa Owolade, writer and critic
- Chitra Ramaswamy, author, restaurant critic and journalist
Isabel Hilton
In a comment on the longlistings announced today, Hilton says, “Reaching a longlist in a year when so many wonderful nonfiction books have been published was never going to be easy, but I could not be happier with the result.
“It is, of course, a list of remarkable and outstanding books, and they shed new and brilliant light on our contemporary world through explorations of history, of memory, of science and nature.
Knopf’s USA cover design
“Collectively this wonderful reflection of creativity, of critical thinking, and great writing left us in no doubt that the nonfiction world is overflowing with energy and
talent.”
The 2023 winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction is the American-Canadian author John Vaillant for his Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World, released on May 23, 2023, in the United Kingdom by Sceptre, a division of Hachette UK’s Hodder & Stoughton.
In the United States and Canada, the book is published by Penguin Random House’s Knopf, and was released on June 6, 2023.
Our international readers who have lived and worked in some of the Earth’s hottest spots this summer will understand that the Baillie Gifford Prize program placed considerable emphasis on the importance of the book’s examination of the connection between catastrophic wildfire episodes and the “new century of fire,” as Earth’s astonishing climate emergency explodes in “a hotter, more flammable world.”
More from Publishing Perspectives on the international publishing business’ myriad book and industry awards is here, more on the United Kingdom’s market is here, more on the Baillie Gifford Prize is here, and more on nonfiction is here.