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 shortlist includes books from Belarusian writer and Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich, Pulitzer Prize-winning cultural critic Margo Jefferson, Franco-British lawyer Philippe Sands, QC, and Libyan writer Hisham Matar.
Chair of Judges Stephanie Flanders, says: ‘Of the many superb books on the longlist, these are the four books that each of us [judges] would be happy so see win. If they have anything in common it is perhaps the emphasis on the first person – and first-hand reporting. There are voices and stories in these books that we haven’t heard before and which are going to stay with me for a very long time.’
Here is the shortlist in full:
- Second-Hand Time by Svetlana Alexievich, translated by Bela Shayevich
- Negroland: A Memoir by Margo Jefferson
- The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between by Hisham Matar
- East West Street by Philippe Sands
Find out more about the Baillie Gifford prize here. The 2016 winner will be announced on Tuesday 15 November.
