The Baillie Gifford Prize 2021 Longlist Announced
Last week the longlist for the £50,000 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction, which celebrates the best in non-fiction writing, was announced.
The titles on this year’s longlist are:
- Consumed: A Sister’s Story By Arifa Akbar
- Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape by Cal Flyn
- Minarets in the Mountains: A Journey into Muslim Europe by Tharik Hussain
- Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945–1955 by Harald Jähner, translated by Shaun Whiteside
- Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe
- The Mutant Project: Inside the Global Race to Genetically Modify Humans by Eben Kirksey
- Things I Have Withheld by Kei Miller
- Fall: The Mystery of Robert Maxwell by John Preston
- Blood Legacy: Reckoning With a Family’s Story of Slavery by Alex Renton
- Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain by Sathnam Sanghera
- In Memory of Memory by Maria Stepanova translated by Sasha Dugdale
- Burning Man: The Ascent of DH Lawrence by Frances Wilson
- Free: Coming of Age at the End of History by Lea Ypi
Learn more about the 2021 longlist here.
The longlist has been chosen by a panel chaired by Sunday Times literary editor Andrew Holgate, alongside award winning novelist Sara Collins, physicist, oceanographer, writer and broadcaster Dr Helen Czerski, biographer and critic Kathryn Hughes, author and TV and radio presenter Johny Pitts and historian and writer Dominic Sandbrook.
The shortlist for the 2021 award will be announced on Friday 15 October, live from the Cheltenham Literature Festival.
Andrew Holgate, chair of judges, says:
“We have worked incredibly hard as a group of judges on this longlist, and ranged a long way out of our boundaries to ensure we picked up promising books that might not otherwise have been considered. I think and hope that the results of that speak for themselves – a list full of rigour, endeavour, variety and real verve, open to a broad readership, with some terrific surprises, and an onus on originality. I can’t thank my fellow judges enough for their generosity, commitment and cohesiveness, and I can’t wait for the shortlist now.”
On Thursday 16 September, you can listen to the longlist episode of Read Smart, The Baillie Gifford Prize podcast. Host Razia Iqbal discusses the longlist with judges Dominic Sandbrook and Kathryn Hughes. The podcast is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Stitcher and Entale.
The winner of the 2021 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction will be announced at an event at the Science Museum, generously supported by the Blavatnik Family Foundation, on Tuesday 16 November.
Join the conversation on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, where you can get the latest on all things Baillie Gifford Prize.