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.
Richard Miller Flanagan is an Australian writer, who has also worked as a film director and screenwriter. He won the 2014 Man Booker Prize for his novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North and the 2024 Baillie Gifford Prize for Question 7, making him the first writer in history to win both Britain's major fiction and non-fiction prizes.
David Hackett Fischer is University Professor of History Emeritus at Brandeis University. Fischer's major works have covered topics ranging from large macroeconomic and cultural trends to narrative histories of significant events to explorations of historiography.
Margo Lillian Jefferson is an American writer and academic.
Baillie Gifford & Co is an investment management firm which is wholly owned by partners, all of whom work within the firm. It was founded in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1908 and still has its headquarters in the city. It has corporate offices in New York and London.
Kate Summerscale is an English writer and journalist. She is best known for the bestselling narrative nonfiction books The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, which was made into a television drama, The Wicked Boy and The Haunting of Alma Fielding. She has won a number of literary prizes, including the Samuel Johnson Prize for Nonfiction in 2008.
The Cundill History Prize is an annual Canadian book prize for "the best history writing in English". It was established in 2008 by Peter Cundill and is administered by McGill University. The prize encourages "informed public debate through the wider dissemination of history writing to new audiences around the world" and is awarded to an author whose book, published in the past year, demonstrates "historical scholarship, originality, literary quality and broad appeal". No restrictions are set on the topic of the book or the nationality of the author, and English translations are permitted.
John Vaillant is an American Canadian writer and journalist whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, National Geographic, and Outside. He has written both non-fiction and fiction books.
Julia Lovell is a British scholar, author, and translator whose non-fiction books focus on China.
Frank Dikötter is a Dutch historian who specialises in modern China. Dikötter has been Chair Professor of Humanities at the University of Hong Kong since 2006. In Patient Zero (2003) and Narcotic Culture (2004), Dikötter argued that the impact of the prohibition of opium on the Chinese people led to greater harm than the effects of the drug itself. Dikötter is the author of The People's Trilogy, which consists of Mao's Great Famine (2010), The Tragedy of Liberation (2013), and The Cultural Revolution (2016), providing an overview of Communist-led China.
Gods and demons fiction or Shenmo fiction is a subgenre of Chinese fantasy fiction that revolves around the deities, immortals, demons and monsters of Chinese mythology. The term shenmo xiaoshuo, coined in the early 20th century by the writer and literary historian Lu Xun, literally means "gods and demons novel". Representative works of shenmo fiction include the novels Journey to the West and Investiture of the Gods.
Ada Ferrer is a Cuban-American historian. She is Julius Silver Professor of History and Latin American Studies at New York University, and will join the faculty at Princeton University as the Dayton-Stockton Professor of History in July 2024. She was awarded the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in History for her book Cuba: An American History.
The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between is a memoir by Hisham Matar that was first published in June 2016. The memoir centers on Matar's return to his native Libya in 2012 to search for the truth behind the 1990 disappearance of his father, a prominent political dissident of the Gaddafi regime. It won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography, the inaugural 2017 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and the 2017 Folio Prize, becoming the first nonfiction book to do so.
Stephen R. Platt is an American historian and writer. He is currently a professor of Chinese history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Zhi Bingyi was a Chinese scientist in the fields of telecommunications engineering, measuring instrument and Chinese character encoding. He was one of the earliest figures in Chinese history to have contributed to the science of characters computer processing. He has been hailed by many as "Chinese characters information processing pioneer". He was an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Wang Zhao was a Chinese linguist and advocate of modern phonetic writing. Wang was from Ninghe, Tianjin in the province of Zhili. He created a syllabary for Chinese writing based on Mandarin called the Mandarin Alphabet. While this system is no longer used, Wang was the first to formally suggest the adoption of a national language for China based on Mandarin.
Gary Jonathan Bass is an American academic and author, specializing in international security, international law, and human rights. He is the William P. Boswell Professor of World Politics of Peace and War at Princeton University, where he has taught since 1999. Bass earned his Bachelor of Arts and PhD from Harvard University, where he wrote for The Harvard Crimson. He has authored four books, including The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide, a Pulitzer Prize finalist. His most recent work, Judgment at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia, has received widespread acclaim and was shortlisted for major literary awards. Bass has also contributed to numerous publications, including The New York Times and The Economist.
Revolusi: Indonesia and the Birth of the Modern World is a 2020 historical non-fiction book by David Van Reybrouck. It covers the history of Indonesia from prehistory, the Dutch colonial period, the Indonesian National Revolution to the modern era, utilising interviews with ordinary people that van Reybrouck conducted. It was first published in Dutch in 2020 and in English in 2024 by The Bodley Head in a translation by David Colmer and David McKay. It was a bestseller when it was first published in the Netherlands.
Fire Weather: A True Story From a Hotter World, also published as Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World, is a 2023 book by Canadian-American journalist John Vaillant published by Knopf, a subsidiary of Penguin Random House. The book details the 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire which led to the evacuation of more than 88,000 residents of Fort McMurray, in the province of Alberta, Canada and the destruction of much of the town.
Jing Tsu is a Taiwanese-American author and professor of East Asian studies. Born in Taiwan, she immigrated to New Mexico at the age of nine; there, her mother taught her and her siblings Chinese calligraphy and writing. After receiving a PhD from Harvard University in East Asian Languages and Civilizations in 2001, she became a professor at Yale University.
