Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
A minute-by-minute account of the prelude to nuclear Armageddon; the journey of the heart of a nine-year-old girl from car crash to transplant; and an overlooked history of the birth of one of the world’s most populous democracies are among the books shortlisted for this year’s Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction.
The six titles on the shortlist “offer profound insight into some of the most pressing issues of our time”, said Isabel Hilton, the chair of judges, a journalist and founder of China Dialogue.
Annie Jacobsen’s Nuclear War: A Scenario was described by judges as “deeply researched and terrifying” while The Story of a Heart by Rachel Clarke, an NHS palliative care doctor, was found to be “a profoundly moving” story of life and death.
Two of the titles on the shortlist, which was announced on Thursday night at the Cheltenham Literary Festival, are by authors who have also been celebrated for their fiction: Question 7 by Richard Flanagan and A Man of Two Faces by Vietnamese-American Viet Thanh Nguyen.
Flanagan won the 2014 Booker Prize for his novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North — raising the prospect that with Question 7, a “love song to his island home” of Tasmania, he might be the first writer to scoop the “double” of the UK’s premier fiction and non-fiction prizes.
Nguyen’s book, which charts his search for belonging, interrogating the inherent tensions within his Vietnamese-American identity and the imperfection of memory, borrows its title from the opening line of his 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winning novel The Sympathizer.
The list includes one work in translation, Revolusi: Indonesia and the Birth of the Modern World by the Belgian David Van Reybrouck (translated by David Colmer and David McKay), which tells the story of the revolt against Dutch rule that set the template for a wave of decolonisation.
Acclaimed biographer Sue Prideaux, author of Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin, makes it to the shortlist for the second time, following her 2012 biography Strindberg: A Life. The judges said that her latest book “cast fresh light on this most incredible of artistic lives”.
Salman Rushdie, who received the 1981 Booker, was also a potential contender for the fiction/non-fiction prize double after Knife, his account of the attempt on his life in August 2022, was longlisted but failed to make it into the final six.
Baillie Gifford has maintained its sponsorship of the non-fiction prize despite cancelling its literary festival sponsorships earlier this year after activist pressure led the Hay Festival and Edinburgh International Book Festival to cut ties with the Scottish asset manager.
The judging panel — which alongside Hilton, included investigative journalist Heather Brooke; comment and culture editor for New Scientist, Alison Flood; culture editor of Prospect magazine, Peter Hoskin; the writer and critic, Tomiwa Owolade; and author and restaurant critic Chitra Ramaswamy — made their selection from 349 books published between November 1 2023 and October 31 2024.
The winner will be announced on 19 November.
Join our online book group on Facebook at FT Books Café and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen
Read the full article here
