The Baillie Gifford Prize announced its longlist, with 13 books in contention for the U.K.-based award for nonfiction.
Two of the books on the longlist are finalists for this year’s Kirkus Prize: Jennifer Homans’ Mr. B: George Balanchine’s 20th Century and Tania Branigan’s Red Memory: The Afterlives of China's Cultural Revolution.
Branigan was one of three debut authors to be nominated for the award, along with Hannah Barnes for Time to Think and Jeremy Eichler for Time's Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance.
Tiya Miles made the longlist for her National Book Award-winning All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake, as did David Grann for The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder and John Vaillant for Fire Weather: A True Story From a Hotter World.
Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson were nominated for Power and Progress: Our 1000-Year Struggle Over Technology & Prosperity, alongside Christopher Clark for Revolutionary Spring: Europe Aflame and the Fight for a New World, 1848-1849, and Katja Hoyer for Beyond the Wall: A History of East Germany.
The longlist is rounded out by Siddhartha Mukherjee for The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human; Nathan Thrall for A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy; and Chris van Tulleken for Ultra-Processed People: The Science Behind Food That Isn't Food.
The Baillie Gifford Prize was established 24 years ago; past winners have included Jonathan Coe for Like A Fiery Elephant: The Story of B.S. Johnson and Patrick Radden Keefe for Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty.
The shortlist for this year’s prize, which comes with a cash award of about $63,000, will be announced on Oct. 8, with the winner revealed on Nov. 16.
Michael Schaub, a journalist and regular contributor to NPR, lives near Austin, Texas.
