2005 Winner
B. S. Johnson was one of the best-known young novelists in Britain in the 1960s and 70s. He gained notoriety for his forthright views on the future of the novel and for his idiosyncratic ways of putting them into practice. His innovations included a book with holes cut through the pages, and a novel published in a box so that its unbound chapters could be read in any order. But in November 1973 Johnson's lifelong depression got the better of him, and he was found dead at his north London home. He had taken his own life at the age of forty. Jonathan Coe's long-awaited biography is based upon unique access to the vast collection of papers Johnson left behind, and upon dozens of interviews with those who knew him best.

https://www.thebailliegiffordprize.co.uk/books-and-authors/like-a-fiery-elephant-by-jonathan-coe

2005 Shortlist
Stuart Shorter’s brief life was one of turmoil and chaos. Stuart was homeless, with many of the problems this sub-section of British society display: alcoholism, drug-addiction, crime, violence.

Alexander Masters retraces Stuart’s troubled journey. Scattered with glimpses of the author’s friendship with Stuart in the years before his death, Masters gives us Stuart’s life in reverse, tracing his route in reverse through the post-office heists, attempts at suicide, the many spells in prison, back to a troubled time at school and a violent childhood that lead to the trouble that was to follow him all his life.

https://www.thebailliegiffordprize.co.uk/books-and-authors/stuart-by-alexander-masters

2005 Shortlist
Returning to the city with his young family after twenty-one years absence, Suketu Mehta captures the unique essence of a city where ‘the greatest luxury of all is solitude’. Mehta weaves his own story within the lives of the many individuals he meets during his time in the city. In a world where crime, sex and celebrity are easily mixed with religion, extreme poverty and tradition he attempts to discover the reasons why people choose to follow their dreams in Mumbai.

https://www.thebailliegiffordprize.co.uk/books-and-authors/maximumcity-by-suketu-mehta

2005 Shortlist
Mingling personal memoir with cultural history, Orhan Pamuk explores his own ideas about Istanbul in an evocation of the city that has been his home for fifty years. With a unique sense of history and gift for narrative, Pamuk revisits the houses, streets and neighbourhoods of his childhood, his daydreams and pastimes, and his own family’s secrets and idiosyncrasies.

What begins as a portrait of the artist as a young man becomes a portrait of an extraordinary city. Pamuk guides the reader through Istanbul’s lost paradises, its monuments and dilapidated Ottoman villas, back streets and waterways, and introduces the city’s many writers, artists and historians.

https://www.thebailliegiffordprize.co.uk/books-and-authors/istanbul-by-orhan-pamuk

2005 Shortlist
The preface to Matisse the Master begins with a quote from Matisse himself: ‘If my story were ever to be written down truthfully from start to finish it would amaze everyone’. Until the publication of The Unknown Matisse, the first volume of Spurling’s biography of Henri Matisse, the few facts known about his life had been distorted by inaccuracy, misunderstanding and glaring gaps. During the fifteen years she spent researching and writing this definitive two-volume biography, Spurling’s access to hitherto closed family archives enabled her to uncover a character who bears little relation to the popular image of Matisse.

https://www.thebailliegiffordprize.co.uk/books-and-authors/matisse-the-master-by-hilary-spurling

2005 Shortlist
In 1831, the authorities unearthed a series of crimes at No. 3, Nova Scotia Gardens in East London that appeared to echo the notorious Burke and Hare killings in Edinburgh three years earlier. After a long investigation, it became known that a group of body snatchers were supplying the anatomy schools with fresh ‘examples’ for dissection. The case became known as ‘The Italian Boy’ and caused a furore that led directly to the passing of controversial legislation that marked the beginning of the end of body snatching in Britain.

https://www.thebailliegiffordprize.co.uk/books-and-authors/the-italian-boy-by-sarah-wise

2006 Winner
In the course of 1599, Shakespeare turned 35. Before the end of the year, he had completed Henry V, written Julius Caesar and As You Like It in quick succession, and produced the first draft of his greatest play, Hamlet. If Shakespeare in Love playfully imagined how Shakespeare was inspired to write Romeo and Juliet, Shapiro was determined to show how The Bard progressed from his tale of two star-crossed lovers to Hamlet. Shapiro finds one question the most pressing: how did Shakespeare become Shakespeare - and in so doing, thereby become one of the greatest writers who ever lived?

https://www.thebailliegiffordprize.co.uk/books-and-authors/1599-by-james-shapiro

2006 Shortlist
Untold Stories is Alan Bennett’s first collection of prose since Writing Home and takes in all his major writings over the last ten years. The title piece is a poignant family memoir with an account of the marriage of his parents, the lives and deaths of his aunts and the uncovering of a long-held family secret. Also included are his much-celebrated diaries for the years 1996-2004, as well as essays, reviews, lectures and reminiscences ranging from childhood trips to the local cinema and a tour around Leeds City Art Gallery to reflections on writing, honours and his Westminster Abbey eulogy for Thora Hird. At times heartrending and at others extremely funny, Untold Stories is an unforgettable anthology.

https://www.thebailliegiffordprize.co.uk/books-and-authors/untold-stories-by-alan-bennett

2006 Shortlist
'So wonderful and glorious a collection, that the like will never again be met with'. This is how one awed and wistful observer described King Charles's artworks. During his reign, Charles I assembled an array of paintings by Europe’s great masters that lays claim to being the finest private art collection ever to exist.

After his death, the collection was sold off to raise money for Cromwell’s new regime, resulting in a world where diplomats doubled as art dealers, and ordinary working people (including the King’s plumber) became owners of priceless works of art. This is a vivid portrait of a tragic king and his decadent court, set against the backdrop of political conflict and civil war, which also offers a new and compelling perspective on art and the evolution of collecting in England.

https://www.thebailliegiffordprize.co.uk/books-and-authors/the-sale-of-the-late-kings-goods-by-jerry-brotton

2006 Shortlist
In the 1960s, Carmen Callil visited a psychiatrist called Anne Darquier; they forged a close bond, which was broken when Anne committed suicide. Years later Carmen discovered that Anne’s father was the French war criminal, Louis Darquier de Pellepoix. Louis Darquier was a French Nazi, a collaborator and a con man. He married a failed, alcoholic Australian actress, Myrtle Jones, and Anne, their only child, was abandoned to a nurse at birth. She was raised in poverty in Oxfordshire.

Their extraordinary story – and that of Louis Darquier’s ascent to power before and during the Second World War – is the key to a revelatory account of the terrible acts of the Vichy government during the war years. Louis Darquier – always broke, always desperate for attention, social cachet, women and drink – became the longest serving Commissioner for Jewish Affairs in theVichy government. Over seventy thousand French Jews died in Auschwitz, most were sent to death during his tenure. He was never brought to justice, having fled to Madrid where he lived out the rest of his life.

https://www.thebailliegiffordprize.co.uk/books-and-authors/bad-faith-by-carmen-callil

2006 Shortlist
From Stalin to Sartre, from Milosevic to Monty Python, from Berlusconi and baby-boomers to Bardot and Beckham, Postwar] tells the histories of modern Europe, cultural, political, economic and social, from the end of WWII to the enlargement of the EU and the election of Benedict XVI. Tony Judt has drawn on forty years of reading and writing about modern Europe to create a rich account of the continent’s recent past. Postwar integrates international relations, domestic politics, ideas, social change, economic development and culture – high and low – into a single narrative.

https://www.thebailliegiffordprize.co.uk/books-and-authors/postwar-by-tony-judt

2006 Shortlist
Part history, part cultural biography, and part literary mystery, The Orientalist traces the life of Lev Nussimbaum, a Jew who transformed himself into a Muslim prince and became a best-selling author in Nazi Germany. Tom Reiss first came across Nussimbaum when he went to the ex-USSR to research Russia's oil reserves, and discovered a novel instead. Written on the eve of the Second World War, "Ali and Nino" is a captivating love story set in the glamorous city of Baku, Azerbaijan's capital. The novel's depiction of a lost cosmopolitan society is enthralling, but equally intriguing is the identity of the man who wrote it. Who was Kurban Said, its supposed author? And why did he and his book fade into obscurity? For five years, Reiss tracked Said's protean identity from a wealthy Jewish childhood in Baku, to a romantic adolescence in Persia on the run from the Bolsheviks, and an exile in Berlin as bestselling author and self-proclaimed Muslim prince. The result is a thoroughly unexpected picture of the twentieth-century - of the origins of our ideas about race and religious self-definition, and of the roots of modern fanaticism.

https://www.thebailliegiffordprize.co.uk/books-and-authors/the-orientalist-by-tom-reiss