The Baillie Gifford Prize: Every Non-Fiction Winner Since 1999
The first winner, in 1999, was a history of the Battle of Stalingrad. The most recent, in 2025, was a volume of diaries by an Australian woman in her eighties, and the judges said it was the first time diaries had won. In between are a hawk, a whale, a Beatles book, a fire in the Canadian oil sands and a family that made its fortune selling OxyContin. The prize has had four names and one rule that never changed: the book has to be true.
By Lisanne Swart · 27 winners since 1999 · Founded as the Samuel Johnson Prize · All literary prizes · Last reviewed 22 September 2026
The ten under the Baillie Gifford name · 2016 to 2025
Click a spine to jump to that book below.
EntriesOpened 13 April
Longlist13 books, 3 September
Shortlist1 October
Winner4 November
The 2026 longlist is in; the shortlist of six follows on 1 October and the winner on 4 November. This page is updated when each is announced.
Quick answer
The Baillie Gifford Prize goes each year to one book of non-fiction published in English in the UK, by a writer of any nationality. It began in 1999 as the Samuel Johnson Prize, took its present name in 2016, and is worth £50,000 to the winner. There have been 27 winners. The latest is Helen Garner’s How to End a Story: Collected Diaries (2025); the 2026 longlist of thirteen was announced on 3 September and the winner follows on 4 November. Nobody has won it twice yet, and one previous winner is on this year’s longlist.
How this page chooses
Two jobs, kept apart. The table further down lists all 27 winners from 1999 to 2025, with the name the prize went by that year — facts only.
The ten with a full entry are the ten that won under the Baillie Gifford name, 2016 to 2025, one for each year. There is no ranking in it and no shortlist of favourites. Under each one is a line of plain fact about the book or the author, and nothing that cannot be checked.
Quick facts about the Baillie Gifford Prize
Founded
1999, as the Samuel Johnson Prize, after the NCR Book Award for non-fiction came to an end
Named after
Baillie Gifford, the Edinburgh investment firm that has sponsored it since 2016
Prize money
£50,000 to the winner and £5,000 to each shortlisted author
Who can enter
Writers of any nationality, for non-fiction published in English in the UK that year; books translated into English count, and the translator shares the prize
Announced
Early November; the 2025 winner was named on 4 November at BMA House in London
Winners
27, one a year since 1999
Won by women
9 of the 27, the first being Margaret MacMillan in 2002
Won it twice
Nobody yet. Patrick Radden Keefe, who won in 2021, is on the 2026 longlist
Latest winner
How to End a Story: Collected Diaries by Helen Garner, 2025
Next winner
4 November 2026; the shortlist is due on 1 October
The ten Baillie Gifford Prize winners, 2016 to 2025
Oldest first, one for each year since the prize took the Baillie Gifford name. The line in red is a fact about the book or its author, not an opinion about it.
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01
HistoryNuremberg
East West Street
Philippe Sands · 2016
Sands follows two lawyers who studied in the same city, Lviv, and who gave the Nuremberg trials their two central ideas: Hersch Lauterpacht, who argued for “crimes against humanity”, and Raphael Lemkin, who coined the word “genocide”. Alongside them run the story of Hans Frank, the Nazi governor of occupied Poland, and the story of Sands’s own grandfather, Leon, who also came from Lviv.
Philippe Sands is a barrister and a professor of law at University College London.
An account of the AIDS epidemic in the United States, told through the activists of ACT UP and the Treatment Action Group, who taught themselves the science of drug trials and forced their way into the process that decided which treatments reached patients. France covered the epidemic as a journalist from its first years.
David France also directed the 2012 documentary of the same name, which was nominated for an Academy Award.
The explosion of reactor number four at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant on 26 April 1986, and what came before and after it: the design of the reactor, the test that went wrong, the evacuation of Pripyat, and how the Soviet system handled the disaster and the information about it.
Serhii Plokhy is a professor of Ukrainian history at Harvard University.
The lives of Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly, the five women killed in Whitechapel in 1888 by the man called Jack the Ripper. Rubenhold writes about them rather than about him, and argues that the story that they were all prostitutes does not hold up.
The first book by a woman to win under the Baillie Gifford name.
The Beatles, told in short pieces rather than one continuous narrative: fans, managers, hangers-on, chance meetings, lists and diary entries, alongside the familiar story of the band from Liverpool to the break-up.
Craig Brown is a satirist, best known for his parody diaries in Private Eye.
Three generations of the Sackler family, from Arthur Sackler’s work in medical advertising to Purdue Pharma, the company that made OxyContin, and the role of the drug in the American opioid crisis. The book also follows the family’s name on museum wings and university buildings, and the campaign to take it down.
Keefe is on the 2026 longlist again, with London Falling; no one has yet won the prize twice.
A life of John Donne: the young poet of love poems, the Catholic who became a Protestant, the man who wrecked his career by marrying in secret, and the preacher who ended as Dean of St Paul’s. Rundell quotes the poems throughout and writes for readers who have not read him.
Katherine Rundell is also a children’s novelist, the author of Rooftoppers and The Explorer.
The wildfire that burned into Fort McMurray, the oil sands town in northern Alberta, in May 2016 and forced the whole town to leave. Vaillant moves between the day of the fire, the history of the oil industry and the science of how fire behaves in a warming climate.
John Vaillant is also the author of The Tiger, about a man-eating tiger in the Russian Far East.
Flanagan joins his own life to a chain of history: H.G. Wells, the physicist Leo Szilard and the atomic bomb, and his father, a prisoner of war in Japan who was still alive when the bomb fell on Hiroshima. Running through it is the day Flanagan nearly drowned in a rapid on the Franklin River in Tasmania.
Richard Flanagan won the Booker Prize in 2014 for The Narrow Road to the Deep North.
Garner’s diaries, collected from three earlier volumes into one book: her working life as a novelist and journalist, her friendships, and a marriage that goes wrong. They are written in short entries and she does not explain them afterwards.
The first diaries to win the prize, as the 2025 chair of judges, Robbie Millen, said when the winner was announced.
All 27 winners, with the name the prize went by in the year it was won. The ten rows in red won under the Baillie Gifford name and have a full entry above.
The prize was set up in 1999, when the NCR Book Award for non-fiction came to an end, and it was named after Samuel Johnson. For its first three years an anonymous benefactor paid for it. From 2002 it was the BBC Four Samuel Johnson Prize, from 2009 the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize, and in 2016 the Edinburgh investment firm Baillie Gifford took it over and gave it its own name. The prize money went up with it, to £50,000 for the winner from 2019.
The name has been argued over since. In 2023 more than fifty authors signed an open letter objecting to Baillie Gifford’s investments in companies that profit from fossil fuels, and in May 2024 the Edinburgh International Book Festival ended its sponsorship deal with the firm. The prize itself kept the name and carried on.
What tends to win
History has always done well: the first winner was Antony Beevor’s Stalingrad, and the list since includes the Third Reich, the Paris peace conference of 1919, Mao’s famine, Chernobyl and the Nuremberg trials. Biography comes next, from Pushkin and Berlioz to John Donne and the Beatles.
The winners that people remember outside the prize are often the ones that do not fit that pattern: Helen Macdonald’s H Is for Hawk in 2014, about training a goshawk in the year after her father died, and in 2025 Helen Garner’s diaries, which the judges said were the first diaries ever to win.
Frequently asked questions about the Baillie Gifford Prize
What is the Baillie Gifford Prize?
The UK’s best-known prize for non-fiction. It goes each year to one book published in English in the UK, by a writer of any nationality, and it is worth £50,000 to the winner. It began in 1999 as the Samuel Johnson Prize and took its present name in 2016.
Who won the Baillie Gifford Prize in 2025?
Helen Garner, for How to End a Story: Collected Diaries. The winner was announced on 4 November 2025, and the chair of judges, Robbie Millen, said it was the first time diaries had won the prize.
When is the 2026 Baillie Gifford Prize winner announced?
On 4 November 2026. The longlist of thirteen books was announced on 3 September and the shortlist is due on 1 October.
How much is the Baillie Gifford Prize worth?
£50,000 to the winner and £5,000 to each of the other shortlisted authors.
Was the Baillie Gifford Prize called something else?
Yes. It was the Samuel Johnson Prize from 1999, the BBC Four Samuel Johnson Prize from 2002 and the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize from 2009, before it became the Baillie Gifford Prize in 2016.
Has anyone won the Baillie Gifford Prize twice?
Not yet. Patrick Radden Keefe, who won in 2021 with Empire of Pain, is on the 2026 longlist with London Falling.
Can translated books win the Baillie Gifford Prize?
Yes. The book has to be published in English in the UK in the year of entry, but it can first have been written in any language, and when a translated book wins, the translator shares the prize.
Where do I start with the Baillie Gifford Prize winners?
With the ten most recent, which have a full entry on this page. For more lives written as true stories, my list of the best memoirs and biographies goes wider than the prize.
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