2021 Shortlist
In this moving and lyrical collection of essays, the award-winning poet and novelist Kei Miller explores the silence in which so many important things are kept. He examines the experience of discrimination through this silence and what it means to breach it: to risk words, to risk truths. And he considers the histories our bodies inherit - the crimes that haunt them, and how meaning can shift as we move throughout the world, variously assuming privilege or victimhood.

https://www.thebailliegiffordprize.co.uk/books-and-authors/things-i-have-withheld-by-kei-miller

2021 Shortlist
In February 1991, Robert Maxwell made a triumphant entrance into Manhattan harbour on board his yacht, the Lady Ghislaine. He had come to complete his purchase of the ailing New York Daily News. Crowds lined the quayside to watch his arrival. Taxi drivers stopped their cabs to shake his hand, children asked for his autograph and when Maxwell went to dine in the most fashionable Chinese restaurant in Manhattan, all the diners gave him a standing ovation.

10 months later, he disappeared off the same yacht and several hours later was found dead in the water. Within a few days, Maxwell was being reviled as the embodiment of greed and unscrupulousness. No one had ever fallen so far and so quickly.

What went so wrong? How did a man who had once laid such store on the importance of ethics and good behaviour become reduced to a bloated, amoral wreck?

https://www.thebailliegiffordprize.co.uk/books-and-authors/fall-by-john-preston

2021 Shortlist
Free is an engrossing memoir of coming of age amid great political upheaval. With acute insight and wit, Lea Ypi traces the limits of progress and the burden of the past, illuminating the spaces between ideals and reality, and the hopes and fears of people pulled up by the sweep of history.

https://www.thebailliegiffordprize.co.uk/books-and-authors/free-by-lea-ypi

2022 Winner
Sometime religious outsider and social disaster, sometime celebrity preacher and establishment darling, John Donne was incapable of being just one thing. He was a scholar of law, a sea adventurer, an MP, a priest, the Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral – and perhaps the greatest love poet in the history of the English language. He converted from Catholicism to Protestantism, was imprisoned for marrying a high-born girl without her father’s consent, struggled to feed a family of ten children and was often ill and in pain. He was a man who suffered from black surges of sadness, yet expressed in his verse electric joy and love.

https://www.thebailliegiffordprize.co.uk/books-and-authors/super-infinite-by-katherine-rundell

2022 Shortlist
Legacy of Violence spans two hundred years of history and the full breadth of the British Empire. In it, Elkins reveals an evolutionary and racialized doctrine that espoused an unrelenting deployment of violence to secure and preserve the nation’s imperial interests, and implicates all sides of Britain’s political divides in the creation, execution, and cover-up of that violence. This is an ultimate, definitive corrective to versions of history that would have us believe that Britain’s imperialism was a form of liberation to uncivilized populations: Britain’s use of violence was pervasive, and the practices associate with it were exported, modified, and institutionalized in colonies around the globe.

https://www.thebailliegiffordprize.co.uk/books-and-authors/legacy-of-violence-by-caroline-elkins

2022 Shortlist
In April 1944 nineteen-year-old Rudolf Vrba and fellow inmate Fred Wetzler became the first Jews ever to break out of Auschwitz. Under electrified fences and past armed watchtowers, evading thousands of SS men and slavering dogs, they trekked across marshlands, mountains and rivers to freedom. Vrba's mission: to reveal to the world the truth of the Holocaust.

https://www.thebailliegiffordprize.co.uk/books-and-authors/the-escape-artist-by-jonathan-freedland

2022 Shortlist
In August 2018, Sally Hayden received a Facebook message. ‘Hi sister Sally, we need your help,’ it read. ‘We are under bad condition in Libya prison. If you have time, I will tell you all the story.’ More messages followed from more refugees. They told stories of enslavement and trafficking, torture and murder,tuberculosis and sexual abuse. And they revealed something else: that they were all incarcerated as a direct result of European policy.

From there began a staggering investigation into the migrant crisis across North Africa. This book follows the shocking experiences of refugees seeking sanctuary, but it also surveys the bigger picture: the negligence of NGOs and corruption within the United Nations.

https://www.thebailliegiffordprize.co.uk/books-and-authors/my-fourth-time-we-drowned-by-sally-hayden

2022 Shortlist
The Restless Republic ranges from London to Leith, Cornwall to Connacht, from the corridors of power to the common fields and hillsides. Gathering her cast of trembling visionaries and banished royalists, dextrous mandarins and bewildered bystanders, Anna Keay brings to vivid life the most extraordinary and experimental decade in Britain’s history. It is the story of how these tempestuous years set the British Isles on a new course, and of what happened when a conservative people tried revolution.

https://www.thebailliegiffordprize.co.uk/books-and-authors/the-restless-republic-by-anna-keay

2022 Shortlist
A Fortunate Woman is a compelling, thoughtful and insightful look at the life and work of a country doctor. Funny, moving and not afraid of the dark, it will speak to readers everywhere.

Polly Morland was clearing her late mother’s house when she found a battered paperback fallen behind the family bookshelf. Opening it, she was astonished to see an old photograph of the remote, wooded valley in which she lives. The book was A Fortunate Man, John Berger’s classic account of a country doctor working in the same valley more than half a century earlier. This chance discovery led Morland to the remarkable doctor who serves that valley community today, a woman whose own medical vocation was inspired by reading the very same book as a teenager.

https://www.thebailliegiffordprize.co.uk/books-and-authors/a-fortunate-woman-by-polly-morland

2023 Winner
In May 2016, Fort McMurray, Alberta, the hub of Canada's oil industry, was overrun by wildfire. The multi-billion-dollar disaster turned entire neighbourhoods into firebombs and drove 90,000 people from their homes in a single afternoon. Through the story of this apocalyptic conflagration, John Vaillant explores the past and the future of our ever-hotter, more flammable world.

For hundreds of millennia, fire has been a partner in our evolution, shaping culture and civilization. Yet in our age of intensifying climate change, we are seeing its destructive power unleashed in ways never before witnessed by human beings. With masterly prose and cinematic style, Vaillant delves into the intertwined histories of the oil industry and climate science, the unprecedented devastation wrought by modern wildfires, and the lives forever changed by these disasters. Fire Weather is urgent reading for our new century of fire.

https://www.thebailliegiffordprize.co.uk/books-and-authors/fire-weather-by-john-vaillant

2023 Shortlist
A stirring account of how music acts as a witness to history and a medium of cultural memory in the post-Holocaust world.

When it comes to how societies commemorate their own distant dreams and catastrophes, we often think of books, archives, or memorials carved from stone. But in Time’s Echo, Jeremy Eichler makes a revelatory case for the power of music as culture’s memory, an art form uniquely capable of carrying forward meaning from the past.

Eichler shows how four towering composers - Richard Strauss, Arnold Schoenberg, Benjamin Britten and Dmitri Shostakovich - lived through the era of the Second World War and the Holocaust and later transformed their experiences into deeply moving works of music, scores that carry forward the echoes of lost time. A lyrical narrative full of insight and compassion, this book deepens how we think about the legacies of war, the presence of the past, and the profound possibilities of art in our lives today.

https://www.thebailliegiffordprize.co.uk/books-and-authors/times-echo-by-jeremy-eichler

2023 Shortlist
There can be few more exciting or frightening moments in European history than the spring of 1848. Almost as if by magic, in city after city, from Palermo to Paris to Venice, huge crowds gathered, sometimes peaceful and sometimes violent, and the political order that had held sway since the defeat of Napoleon simply collapsed. 

Christopher Clark's spectacular new book recreates with verve, wit and insight this extraordinary period. Some rulers gave up at once, others fought bitterly, but everywhere new politicians, beliefs and expectations surged forward. The role of women in society, the end of slavery, the right to work, national independence and the final emancipation of the Jews all became live issues.

https://www.thebailliegiffordprize.co.uk/books-and-authors/revolutionary-spring-by-christopher-clark