Australia's Richard Flanagan has been named the winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction 2024 for his book Question 7. The Baillie Gifford prize is the UK's premier annual prize for nonfiction, celebrating exceptional nonfiction writing, across everything from current affairs, politics, science and sport, to history, travel, biography and the arts.

Richard Flanagan is now the first author to 'win the double' of both the Booker Prize for Fiction – which he won in 2014 for his novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North – and the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction. Flanagan is a highly regarded Australian novelist who has shown his versatility with several insightful works of nonfiction; you can discover more of his work here.

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Question 7 by Richard Flanagan

Beginning at a love hotel by Japan's Inland Sea and ending by a river in Tasmania, Question 7 is about the choices we make about love and the chain reaction that follows.

By way of H. G. Wells and Rebecca West's affair through 1930s nuclear physics to Flanagan's father working as a slave labourer near Hiroshima when the atom bomb is dropped, this genre-defying daisy chain of events reaches fission when Flanagan as a young man finds himself trapped in a rapid on a wild river not knowing if he is to live or to die.

At once a love song to his island home and to his parents, this hypnotic melding of dream, history, literature, place and memory is about how reality is never made by realists and how our lives so often arise out of the stories of others and the stories we invent about ourselves.

Isabel Hilton, Chair of Judges, says:

'Question 7 is an astonishingly accomplished meditation on memory, history, trauma, love and death – and an intricately woven exploration of the chains of consequence that frame a life.

In a year rich in remarkable books, Richard Flanagan’s Question 7 spoke to the judges for its outstanding literary qualities and its profound humanity. This compelling memoir ranges from intimate human relations to an unflinching examination of the horrors of the 20th century, reflecting on unanswerable questions that we must keep asking.'

Toby Mundy, Prize director, says:

'In winning the Baillie Gifford Prize 2024 with Question 7, Richard Flanagan has achieved an unprecedented double. No author has ever won both this prize and the Booker Prize for fiction. It is a staggering achievement, which confirms Richard Flanagan as one of the world’s most significant literary writers.'

The Baillie Gifford Prize (formerly known as the Samuel Johnson Prize) has been running since 1999, and alongside the Booker Prize, is considered one of the UK's most prestigious literary awards. As the winner, Richard Flanagan will receive £50,000, and the other shortlisted authors will each receive £5,000. Read more about the Baillie Gifford Prize and Flanagan's win here.