Read Smart Podcast Episode 6: The 2020 Longlist

September 15, 2020

We explore the 13 books that make up The 2020 Baillie Gifford Prize longlist in more depth. Host, BBC’s Razia Iqbal explores each of the 13 titles and authors with 2020 judges, BBC presenter, professor and author Shahidha Bari, New Statesman writer Leo Robson, and journalist and author Bee Wilson. They go through each book individually and discuss how each title reflects the very best in non-fiction.

The #BGPrize2020 longlist is:

• One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time by Craig Brown (HarperCollins, 4th Estate)
• Labours of Love – The Crisis of Care by Madeleine Bunting (Granta Publications, Granta)
• Dear Life by Rachel Clarke (Little, Brown)
• The Idea of the Brain: A History by Matthew Cobb (Profile Books)
• Eat the Buddha – The Story of Modern Tibet Through the People of One Town by Barbara Demick (Granta Publications, Granta)
• The Lives of Lucian Freud: FAME 1968- 2011 by William Feaver (Bloomsbury Publishing)
• Black Spartacus: The Epic Life of Toussaint Louverture by Sudhir Hazareesingh (Penguin Random House, Allen Lane)
• Our Bodies, Their Battlefield: What War Does to Women by Christina Lamb (Harper Collins, William Collins)
• Diary of a Young Naturalist by Dara McAnulty (Little Toller)
• Those Who Forget: One Family’s Story; A Memoir, a History, a Warning by Géraldine Schwarz (Pushkin Press)
• Stranger in the Shogun’s City: A Woman’s Life in Nineteenth-Century Japan by Amy Stanley (Vintage, Chatto & Windus)
• The Haunting of Alma Fielding: A True Ghost Story by Kate Summerscale (Bloomsbury Publishing, Bloomsbury Circus)
• Square Haunting: Five Women, Freedom and London Between the Wars by Francesca Wade (Faber & Faber)

Find out more about the longlist here.