The Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction, formerly the Samuel Johnson Prize, is an annual British book prize for the best non-fiction writing in the English language. It was founded in 1999 following the demise of the NCR Book Award. With its motto "All the best stories are true", the prize covers current affairs, history, politics, science, sport, travel, biography, autobiography and the arts. The competition is open to authors of any nationality whose work is published in the UK in English. The longlist, shortlist and winner is chosen by a panel of independent judges, which changes every year. Formerly named after English author and lexicographer Samuel Johnson, the award was renamed in 2015 after Baillie Gifford, an investment management firm and the primary sponsor. Since 2016, the annual dinner and awards ceremony has been sponsored by the Blavatnik Family Foundation.
John Reginald Halliday Christie was an English serial killer and serial rapist active during the 1940s and early 1950s. He murdered at least eight people—including his wife Ethel—by strangling them inside his flat at 10 Rillington Place, Notting Hill, London. The bodies of three of his victims were found in a wallpaper-covered kitchen alcove soon after he had moved out of Rillington Place during March 1953. The remains of two more victims were discovered in the garden, and his wife's body was found beneath the floorboards in the front room. Christie was arrested and convicted of his wife's murder, for which he was hanged.
Hallie Rubenhold is an American-born British historian and author. Her work specializes in 18th and 19th century social history and women's history. Her 2019 book The Five, about the lives of the women murdered by Jack the Ripper, was shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize and won the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-fiction. Rubenhold's focus on the victims of murder, rather than on the identity or the acts of the perpetrator, has been credited with changing attitudes to the proper commemoration of such crimes and to the appeal and function of the true crime genre.
Constance Emily Kent (1844–1944) was an English woman who confessed to the murder of her half-brother, Francis Saville Kent, in 1860, when she was aged 16 and he aged three. The case led to high-level pronouncements that there was no longer any ancient priest-penitent privilege in England and Wales. Kent's death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, and she was released after serving twenty years. In later life, she changed her name to Ruth Emilie Kaye, became a nurse and for twenty years was matron of a nurses' home in East Maitland, New South Wales. She died at the age of 100.
Benedict Richard Pierce Macintyre is a British author, reviewer and columnist for The Times newspaper. His columns range from current affairs to historical controversies.
Marion Barbara 'Joe' Carstairs was a wealthy British power boat racer known for her speed, eccentric lifestyle, and gender nonconformity. In the 1920s, she was known as the ‘fastest woman on water’.
Dr Ruth Scurr FRSL, aka Lady Stothard, is a British writer, historian and literary critic. She is a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.
William Saville-Kent was an English marine biologist and author.
Andrea Wulf is a German-British historian and writer who has written books, newspaper articles and book reviews.
Philip Hoare is a British writer, film-maker and curator. He won the 2009 Samuel Johnson Prize, now known as the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction, for his work Leviathan, or the Whale.
The Suspicions of Mr Whicher is a British series of television films made by Hat Trick Productions for ITV, written by Helen Edmundson and Neil McKay. It stars Paddy Considine in the title role of detective inspector Jack Whicher of the Metropolitan Police. The first film, The Murder at Road Hill House, was based on the real-life Constance Kent murder case of 1860, as interpreted by Kate Summerscale in her 2008 book The Suspicions of Mr Whicher or The Murder at Road Hill House, which was the winner of Britain's Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction in 2008, and was read as BBC Radio 4's Book of the Week in April the same year.
Bouchercon is an annual convention of creators and devotees of mystery and detective fiction. It is named in honour of writer, reviewer, and editor Anthony Boucher; also the inspiration for the Anthony Awards, which have been issued at the convention since 1986. This page details Bouchercon XXI and the 5th Anthony Awards ceremony.
Bouchercon is an annual convention of creators and devotees of mystery and detective fiction. It is named in honour of writer, reviewer, and editor Anthony Boucher, who is also the inspiration for the Anthony Awards, which have been issued at the convention since 1986. This page details Bouchercon XL and the 24th Anthony Awards ceremony.
Frances Wilson is an English author, academic, and critic.
Detective Inspector Jonathan "Jack" Whicher was an English police detective. He was one of the original eight members of London's newly formed Detective Branch, which was established at Scotland Yard in 1842. During his career, Whicher earned a reputation among the finest in Europe.
Anna Julia Keay (born August 1974 in the West Highlands of Scotland), is a British architectural historian, author and television personality and director of The Landmark Trust since 2012.
Katherine Rundell is an English author and academic. She is the author of Impossible Creatures, named Waterstones Book of the Year for 2023. She is also the author of Rooftoppers, which in 2015 won both the overall Waterstones Children's Book Prize and the Blue Peter Book Award for Best Story, and was short-listed for the Carnegie Medal. She is a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford and has appeared as an expert guest on BBC Radio 4 programmes including Start the Week, Poetry Please, Seriously.... and Private Passions.
Ann Wroe FRSL is an English author and columnist who has been the obituaries editor of The Economist since 2003.
This Divided Island: Life, Death, and the Sri Lankan War is a book by Indian author and journalist, Samanth Subramanian, written as a non fiction account of the Sri Lankan Civil War.
Amy Stanley is an American historian of early modern Japan. In 2007, Stanley began teaching in the Department of History at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on Japanese history, global history, and women's/gender history. She is best known for her most book Stranger in the Shogun's City: A Japanese Woman and Her World, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for biography, and was a finalist for both the Baillie Gifford Prize and Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography.
