The Turner Prize, named after the English painter J. M. W. Turner, is an annual prize presented to a British visual artist. Between 1991 and 2016, only artists under the age of 50 were eligible. The prize is awarded at Tate Britain every other year, with various venues outside of London being used in alternate years. Since its beginnings in 1984 it has become the UK's most publicised art award. The award represents all media.
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.
Craig Edward Moncrieff Brown is an English critic and satirist, best known for parliamentary sketch writing, humorous articles and parodies for newspapers and magazines including The Times, the Daily Mail and Private Eye.
Martha Catherine Kearney is a British-Irish journalist and broadcaster. She was the main presenter of BBC Radio 4's lunchtime news programme The World at One for 11 years.
James S. Shapiro is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University who specializes in Shakespeare and the Early Modern period. Shapiro has served on the faculty at Columbia University since 1985, teaching Shakespeare and other topics, and he has published widely on Shakespeare and Elizabethan culture.
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.
Paul Farley FRSL is a British poet, writer and broadcaster.
Margo Lillian Jefferson is an American writer and academic.
Lavinia Elaine Greenlaw is an English poet, novelist and non-fiction writer. She won the Prix du Premier Roman with her first novel and her poetry has been shortlisted for awards that include the T. S. Eliot Prize, Forward Prize and Whitbread Poetry Prize. She was shortlisted for the 2014 Costa Poetry Award for A Double Sorrow: A Version of Troilus and Criseyde. Greenlaw currently holds the post of Professor of Creative Writing (Poetry) at Royal Holloway, University of London.
Bernardine Anne Mobolaji Evaristo is a British author and academic. Her novel Girl, Woman, Other jointly won the Booker Prize in 2019 alongside Margaret Atwood's The Testaments, making her the first Black woman to win the Booker. Evaristo is Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University London and President of the Royal Society of Literature, the second woman and the first black person to hold the role since it was founded in 1820.
Bidisha Mamata is a British broadcaster and presenter specialising in international affairs and human rights, political analysis, the arts and culture. She is also a multimedia artist making films and stills.
Kitty Empire is the pen name of a British writer and music critic, currently writing for The Observer.
Sarah Bartlett Churchwell is a professor of American Literature and Public Understanding of the Humanities at the School of Advanced Study, University of London, UK. Her expertise is in 20th- and 21st-century American literature and cultural history, especially the 1920s and 1930s. She has appeared on British television and radio and has been a judge for the Booker Prize, the Baillie Gifford Prize, the Women's Prize for Fiction, and the David Cohen Prize for Literature. She is the director of the Being Human festival and the author of three books: The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe; Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of The Great Gatsby; and Behold America: A History of America First and the American Dream. In April 2021, she was long listed for the Orwell Prize for Journalism.
Thomas Vincent Emerson is a British architect based in London and Zürich. His practice, 6a architects, founded with Stephanie Macdonald in 2001 is best known for designing buildings for the arts and education for which it has won several RIBA Awards, the Schelling Medal for architecture. and the Tessenow Medal 2023. He was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2021 New Year Honours for services to architecture and education. In 2023 Emerson and Macdonald were elected Royal Academicians by the Royal Academy in London.
Heather Phillipson is a British artist working in a variety of media including video, sculpture, electronic music, large-scale installations, online works, text and drawing. She was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2022. Her work has been presented at major venues internationally and she has received multiple awards for her artwork, videos and poetry, including the Film London Jarman Award in 2016. She is also an acclaimed poet whose writing has appeared widely online, in print and broadcast.
Laura Cumming is a British journalist who is the art critic of The Observer newspaper, a position she has held since 1999. Before that she worked for The Guardian, the New Statesman and the BBC. In addition to her career in journalism, Cumming has written well-received books on self-portraits in art and the discovery of a lost portrait by Diego Velázquez in 1845. The Vanishing Man was a New York Times bestseller and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 2016.
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.
Momtaza Mehri is a Somali-British poet and essayist.
Sudhir Hazareesingh, GCSK, is a British-Mauritian historian. He has been a fellow and Tutor in Politics at Balliol College, Oxford since 1990. Most of his work relates to modern political history from 1850; including the history of contemporary France as well as Napoleon, the Republic and Charles de Gaulle.
Lea Ypi is an Albanian academic and author. She is a professor of political theory at the London School of Economics. In 2022, she was named one of the world's top ten thinkers by the British magazine Prospect and one of the most important cultural figures by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. She was named one of the six most important thinkers of 2023 by El Pais. Her work has been translated in 30 languages and won numerous prizes, including the British Academy "Brian Barry" Prize for excellence in Political Science and a Leverhulme Prize for outstanding research achievements. She was elected to the Academia Europaea in 2020 and is a member of the jury of the Deutscher Memorial Prize.
