“Formidable feminine novelists, ghastly literary males, a faith-shaken poet, eunuchs, pirates, attractive wolves, worldwide terrorists” are among the many topics lined by books on this 12 months’s Baillie Gifford shortlist, in keeping with its judging chair, Robbie Millen.
Literature is a theme of this 12 months’s checklist, which options the collected diaries of the Australian author Helen Garner alongside books concerning the Scottish novelist Muriel Spark and the poet Tennyson.
The shortlist for the UK’s most prestigious nonfiction prize additionally consists of books on the historical past of Islamic slavery and the emergence of radical extremism within the west. “The six books on this 12 months’s shortlist have actual breadth when it comes to material and elegance,” stated Millen, who’s literary editor of the Occasions and the Sunday Occasions.
The Guardian’s worldwide safety correspondent, Jason Burke, is shortlisted for The Revolutionists: The Story of the Extremists Who Hijacked the Seventies. The guide “makes a counterintuitive argument”, stated the judges, “tracing the decline of the left that led to the rise of Islamism”, and is “tremendously well-written”.
Garner was shortlisted for Learn how to Finish a Story, described by the Guardian’s reviewer Rachel Cooke as “the best, richest journals by a author since Virginia Woolf’s”.
Richard Holmes, who was beforehand shortlisted in 1999 and 2009, this time makes the reduce for The Boundless Deep: Younger Tennyson, Science and the Disaster of Perception.
Frances Wilson, beforehand longlisted in 2016 and 2021, was chosen for Electrical Spark: The Enigma of Muriel Spark, described as a “canny biography” by Olivia Laing in her Guardian review.
Requested concerning the literary bent to this 12 months’s shortlist at a press convention on Wednesday, Millen stated that there was “in all probability much less straight historical past being revealed than maybe a couple of years in the past”.
Finishing this 12 months’s shortlist is Captives and Companions: A Historical past of Slavery and the Slave Commerce within the Islamic World by Justin Marozzi, and Lone Wolf: Strolling the Faultlines of Europe by Adam Weymouth.
Requested concerning the lack of racial variety on the shortlist – all six authors are white – Millen stated that “the range [the judges] have been most all in favour of was variety of matter and elegance, and it simply occurred that that’s the way in which the playing cards fell”.
The winner of the prize shall be introduced on 4 November. Whereas the winner will take residence £50,000, the opposite shortlisted authors will obtain £5,000 every.
The Baillie Gifford prize is sponsored by the funding administration firm Baillie Gifford. Lately, the agency has confronted criticism for its investments in companies related to fossil fuels and Israel. Protests final 12 months led to the corporate’s sponsorships of nine UK literary festivals coming to an end.
Final 12 months’s winner, Richard Flanagan – who received the prize for his guide Query 7 – said he would not accept the prize money till Baillie Gifford shared a plan to cut back its funding in fossil gas extraction and improve investments in renewables.
In Wednesday’s convention, the prize director, Toby Mundy, stated that Flanagan had had a “candid” dialog with the fund supervisor, however the final end result was that Flanagan didn’t settle for the cash. It can as a substitute be donated to a literacy charity.
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The corporate’s dedication to sponsor the prize expires this 12 months, so the prize is “deep into conversations” with Baillie Gifford about future sponsorship. There have been “very optimistic indications” that the corporate would proceed to sponsor the award, stated Mundy.
Twelve books had been longlisted for this 12 months’s prize. The longlist additionally featured Daughters of the Bamboo Grove by Barbara Demick; The Best Resort in Kabul by Lyse Doucet; The Final Days of Budapest by Adam LeBor; John & Paul by Ian Leslie; Issues in Nature Merely Develop by Yiyun Li; and Between the Waves by Tom McTague.
Becoming a member of Millen on this 12 months’s judging panel are the historian and creator Pratinav Anil; the journalist and broadcaster Inaya Folarin Iman; the cultural historian, biographer and novelist, and former winner of the prize, Lucy Hughes-Hallett; the deputy tradition editor of the Economist, Rachel Lloyd; and the creator and biographer Peter Parker.
Judges made their choices from 350 books revealed between 1 November 2024 and 31 October 2025.
Latest winners of the prize embrace John Vaillant, Katherine Rundell, Patrick Radden Keefe and Craig Brown.
