The 2023 Baillie Gifford Prize Shortlist – the six books in the running to win this year’s prize – has been announced! The list was announced by the chair of judges, Frederick Studemann, at a live event at the Cheltenham Literature Festival.
The 2023 Shortlist:
| Author/co-author (Nationality) | Title (Imprint) |
| Hannah Barnes (British) | Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock’s Gender Service for Children (Swift Press) |
| Tania Branigan (British) | Red Memory: Living, Remembering and Forgetting China’s Cultural Revolution (Faber & Faber) |
| Christopher Clark (Australian) | Revolutionary Spring: Fighting for a New World 1848-1849 (Allen Lane, Penguin Random House) |
| Jeremy Eichler (American) | Time’s Echo: The Second World War, The Holocaust, and The Music of Remembrance (Faber & Faber) |
| Jennifer Homans (American) | Mr. B: George Balanchine’s Twentieth Century (Granta Books, Granta) |
| John Vaillant (American-Canadian) | Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World (Sceptre, Hodder & Stoughton) |
The shortlist was chosen by this year’s judging panel: Literary Editor of the Financial Times, Frederick Studemann (chair); historian and author Andrea Wulf, theatre critic for The Guardian Arifa Akbar, the writer and historian Ruth Scurr, journalist and critic Tanjil Rashid, and Chief Executive of the Royal Society of Arts Andrew Haldane. Their selection was made from the 12 books on the longlist, which were chosen from 265 books published between 1 November 2022 and 31 October 2023.
The winner will be announced on Thursday, November 16 at an award ceremony at the Science Museum in London, generously supported by the Blavatnik Family Foundation. The announcement will also be live-streamed across social channels.
There will also be a special shortlist edition of the Read Smart podcast next week, which will include the Cheltenham Literature Festival event in full, alongside an interview with last year’s winner, Katherine Rundell. This episode, as well as all previous episodes of the podcast (which is generously sponsored by the Blavatnik Family Foundation), can be found on Spotify, Soundcloud, and Apple Podcasts.
There are also Q&As from all 13 shortlisted authors in a special feature on LitHub.
Keep up to date on all Baillie Gifford Prize news in the lead-up to the winner announcement by following @BGPrize on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, and YouTube.
