The £30,000 Baillie Gifford prize (formerly known as the Samuel Johnson prize) is the UK’s most prestigious award for nonfiction writing. This year’s longlist has been announced and Chair of Judges, Stephanie Flanders, says that each of these 10 titles ‘takes you on a journey that is as engrossing and imaginative as any novel’.

Here is the longlist in full:

• Second-Hand Time by Svetlana Alexievich, translated by Bela Shayevich
• The Vanishing Man by Laura Cumming
• Being a Beast by Charles Foster
• Stalin and the Scientists by Simon Ings
• Negroland: A Memoir by Margo Jefferson
• This Is London by Ben Judah
• The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between by Hisham Matar
• The Gene by Siddhartha Mukherjee
• East West Street by Philippe Sands
• Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas De Quincey by Frances Wilson

The shortlist will be announced on Monday 17 October, and the winner will be announced on Tuesday 15 November. Find out more about the Baillie Gifford prize here.