2003 Winner
Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin (1799-1837) is Russia's greatest poet - a tragic genius who is revered by Russians as their Shakespeare and Mozart rolled into one. Born in Moscow, literary prodigy Pushkin was expelled from St. Petersburg at the age of twenty as a result of his satirical writings. He remained in internal exile, under the supervision of the Emperor, for the next seven years. Throughout his life he continued to excite official disapproval for his political and religious beliefs - and many love affairs. With his wild passions for gambling and women, Pushkin's brief life was as turbulent and dramatic as anything in his work. In 1828 he married society beauty, Natalya Goncharova, who then captivated the heart of a French cavalry officer. Enraged by this, Pushkin engaged in a duel with him, and died at the age of 37, defending his honour.

https://www.thebailliegiffordprize.co.uk/books-and-authors/pushkin-by-t-j-binyon

2003 Shortlist
Vast in scale and woven through with extraordinary stories and characters, Natasha’s Dance ranges from the splendour of eighteenth century St Petersburg to the power of Stalinist propaganda, from folk art to the magic rituals of Asiatic shamans, from the poetry of Pushkin to the music of Musorgsky and the films of Eisenstein, bringing to life an extraordinary cast of serf artists and aristocrats, revolutionaries and exiles, priests and libertines. Beautifully written and gloriously vivid, Natasha's Dance is a triumphant assertion of the greatness of Russia's culture and the remarkable lives of those who have shaped it.

https://www.thebailliegiffordprize.co.uk/books-and-authors/natashas-dance-by-orlando-figes

2003 Shortlist
Aminatta Forna's intensely personal history is a passionate and vivid account of an African childhood, of an idyll which became the stuff of nightmare. As a child she witnessed the upheavals of post-colonial Africa, danger, flight, the bitterness of exile in Britain and the terrible consequences of her dissident father's stand against tyranny.

Forna’s search for the truth that shaped both her childhood and the nation’s destiny begins among the country’s elite and took her into the heart of the rebel territory. Determined to break the silence surrounding her father’s fate, she ultimately uncovered a conspiracy that penetrated the highest reaches of government and forced the nation’s politicians and judiciary to confront their guilt.

https://www.thebailliegiffordprize.co.uk/books-and-authors/devil-that-danced-on-the-water-by-aminatta-forna

2003 Shortlist
Ever wondered why some women bite your head off, or why one guy gets all the girls? Ever pondered why some men bring you balloons while others leave you their genitals? Dr Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation is the book for you. Quirky, entertaining and brilliant, Dr Tatiana, the racy new agony aunt, explains all this and much more. She discloses the best time to have a sex change, how to have a virgin birth, when to seduce your sisters or eat your lover. In giving her solutions, she explains the evolutionary biology of sex, from Darwin’s theory of sexual selection to why sexual reproduction exists at all. This book is a fusion of science and natural history, a blend of wit and rigour that will fascinate and inform.

https://www.thebailliegiffordprize.co.uk/books-and-authors/dr-tatianas-sex-advice-to-all-creation-by-olivia-judson

2003 Shortlist
Claire Tomalin traces Pepy's youth before the diary began, the poor tailor's son, the schoolboy who rejoiced at the execution of Charles I, the aspiring clerk working form Cromwell's senior officials and his transformation into a royalist who helped escort Charles II back to England and the throne.

She illuminates his ability as an administrator and his greatness as a writer, and she follows the extraordinary switchback career of triumphs and disasters that continued for three decades after the diary ended. Finally she shows how he made sure that the diary would be preserved for posterity, and how it took three centuries for the full text to be printed.

As one of our foremost literary biographers Claire Tomalin brings a brilliantly fresh and original eye to a truly remarkable life.

https://www.thebailliegiffordprize.co.uk/books-and-authors/samuel-pepys-by-claire-tomalin

2003 Shortlist
A man of contradictions, Nelson emerges in this biography as a ruthless and aggressive leader, an ambitious attention-seeker capable of self-pity, self-delusion, and childish behaviour; yet to be admired for his transcendent courage, kindness and leadership skills, which inspired love and affection in those he led.

First-time author Edgar Vincent builds on the latest research and brings a sharp and penetrating eye to bear on the extensive primary sources on which his book is based, and enlarges our understanding of the man.

Captured on these pages in all his vigour and complexity Nelson is as charismatic a figure today as he was nearly two hundred years ago.

https://www.thebailliegiffordprize.co.uk/books-and-authors/nelson-by-edgar-vincent

2004 Winner
In 1989 the Berlin Wall fell; shortly afterwards the two Germanies reunited, and East Germany ceased to exist. In a country where the headquarters of the secret police can become a museum literally overnight, and one in fifty East Germans were informing on their countrymen and women, there are a thousand stories just waiting to get out. Anna Funder tells extraordinary tales from the underbelly of the former East Germany – she meets Miriam, who as a sixteen-year-old might have started World War III, visits the man who painted the line which became the Berlin Wall and gets drunk with the legendary ‘Mik Jegger’ of the east, once declared by the authorities to his face to ‘no longer to exist’. This is history full of emotion, attitude and complexity.

https://www.thebailliegiffordprize.co.uk/books-and-authors/stasiland-by-anna-funder

2004 Shortlist
This landmark book uncovers for the first time in detail one of the greatest horrors of the twentieth century: the vast system of Soviet camps that were responsible for the deaths of countless millions. Gulag is the only major history in any language to draw together the mass of memoirs and writings on the Soviet camps that have been published in Russia and the West. Applebaum examines why the Gulag has remained relatively obscure in the historical memory of both the former Soviet Union and the West – and argues that our grasp of twentieth-century history will be incomplete unless we come to terms with it.

https://www.thebailliegiffordprize.co.uk/books-and-authors/gulag-by-anne-applebaum

2004 Shortlist
John Clare (1793-1864) is the greatest labouring-class poet that England has ever produced. No one has written more powerfully of nature, of a rural childhood, and of the alienated and unstable self, but until now he has never been the subject of a comprehensive literary biography. Clare’s ringing voice – quick-witted, passionate, vulnerable, courageous – emerges in generous quotation from his letters, journals and autobiographical writings. Jonathan Bate, the celebrated scholar of Shakespeare, brings the complex man, his beloved work, and his ribald world vividly to life.

https://www.thebailliegiffordprize.co.uk/books-and-authors/john-clare-by-jonathan-bate

2004 Shortlist
A Short History of Nearly Everything is Bill Bryson’s quest to understand everything that has happened from the Big Bang to the rise of civilisation – how we got from there, being nothing at all, to here, being us. On his travels through time and space he encounters a splendid collection of astonishingly eccentric, competitive, obsessive and foolish scientists. In the company of such extraordinary people, Bill Bryson takes us with him on the ultimate eye-opening journey, and reveals the world in a way most of us have never seen before.

https://www.thebailliegiffordprize.co.uk/books-and-authors/a-short-history-of-nearly-everything-by-bill-bryson

2004 Shortlist
In The Zanzibar Chest, Aidan Hartley weaves together his family’s history, his childhood in Africa and his accounts of the continents’ horrendous wars, which he witnessed at first hand as a journalist in the 1990s. After the end of the Cold War, there seemed to be new hope for Africa but again and again in Ethiopia, Somalia, Rwanda and the Congo, terror and genocide prevailed. At once a modern and a historic love story, The Zanzibar Chest is also an epic narrative charting the fates of men and women who embraced and were ultimately transformed by foreign lands.

https://www.thebailliegiffordprize.co.uk/books-and-authors/the-zanzibar-chest-by-aidan-hartley

2004 Shortlist
The Roman Republic was the most remarkable state in history. What began as a small community of peasants camped among marshes and hills ended up ruling the knownworld. Rubicon paints a vivid portrait of the Republic at the climax of its greatness -the same greatness which would bring about the catastrophe of its fall. Tom Holland brings to life this strange and unsettling civilisation, with its extremes of ambition and self sacrifice, bloodshed and desire. Yet, alien as it may seem, the Republic still holds up a mirror to us. Its citizens were obsessed by celebrity chefs, all-night dancing and exotic pets; they fought elections in law courts and were addicted to spin; they toppled foreign tyrants in the name of self-defence. Two thousand years have passed, but we remain the Romans’ heirs.

https://www.thebailliegiffordprize.co.uk/books-and-authors/rubicon-by-tom-holland