Female history and biography writing dominates Baillie Gifford shortlist

Baillie Gifford shortlist 2022. Photograph: Baillie Gifford prize Five of the six books on this year’s shortlist for the Baillie Gifford prize for nonfiction are by women. Caroline Elkins’ Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire; Sally Hayden’s My Fourth Time, We Drowned; Anna Keay’s The Restless Republic: Britain Without a Crown; Polly Morland’s A Fortunate Woman: A Country Doctor’s Story, and Katherine Rundell’s Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne take up all but one of the places. The sixth book vying for the £50,000 first prize is Jonathan Freedland’s The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World. Chair of judges Caroline Sanderson said the books were “marvellously wide-ranging in terms of setting, era, and the creative approaches on display” and “however different the canvas, all have enthralling human stories at their heart”. The shortlist for the prize, which recognises the best nonfiction of the year, was chosen from a longlist of 12 , which was selected from 362 books. Joining Sanderson on the judging panel were writer and science journalist Laura Spinney; critic and writer for The Observer, Rachel Cooke; BBC journalist and presenter, Clive Myrie; author and New Yorker writer, Samanth Subramanian and critic and broadcaster, Georgina Godwin. Elkins’ Legacy of Violence is a look at the empire’s use of violence, and was described by the judges as “one of those books that feels inarguable”. They called it an “astonishing panorama of the British empire in the 20th century, […]

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