2015 Shortlist
Ted Hughes, Poet Laureate, was one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. He is one of Britain’s most important poets, a poet of claws and cages: Jaguar, Hawk and Crow. Event and animal are turned to myth in his work. Yet he is also a poet of deep tenderness, of restorative memory steeped in the English literary tradition. A poet of motion and force, of rivers, light and redemption, of beasts in brooding landscapes.

Renowned scholar Sir Jonathan Bate has spent five years in his archives, unearthing a wealth of new material. His book offers for the first time the full story of Ted Hughes's life as it was lived, remembered and reshaped in his art. It is a book that honours, though not uncritically, Ted Hughes’s poetry and the art of life-writing, approached by his biographer with an honesty answerable to Hughes’s own.

https://www.thebailliegiffordprize.co.uk/books-and-authors/ted-hughes-by-jonathan-bate

2015 Shortlist
A constellation of everyday digital phenomena is rewiring our inner lives. We are increasingly coaxed from the three-dimensional containment of our pre-digital selves into a wonderful and eerie fourth dimension, a world of ceaseless communication, instant information and global connection.

Our portals to this new world have been wedged open, and the silhouette of a figure is slowly taking shape. But what does it feel like to be four-dimensional? How do digital technologies influence the rhythms of our thoughts, the style and tilt of our consciousness? What new sensitivities and sensibilities are emerging with our exposure to the delights, sorrows and anxieties of a networked world? And how do we live in public, with these recoded private lives?

Tackling ideas of time, space, friendship, commerce, pursuit and escape, and moving from Hamlet to the ghosts of social media, from Seinfeld to the fall of Gaddafi, from Facebook politics to Oedipus, The Four-Dimensional Human is a highly original and pioneering portrait of life in a digital landscape.

https://www.thebailliegiffordprize.co.uk/books-and-authors/the-four-dimensional-human-by-laurence-scott

2015 Shortlist
When Emma Sky, an intrepid young British woman, volunteered to help rebuild Iraq after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, she had little idea what she was letting herself in for. It was only supposed to last three months but instead spanned a decade.

As the representative of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Kirkuk and then the political advisor to US General Odierno, Sky was valued for her outspoken voice and different perspectives that she brought due to her knowledge of the Middle East. Since the invasion in 2003, Sky has been a tireless witness to American efforts to transform a country traumatized by decades of war, sanctions and brutal dictatorship; to insurgencies and civil war; to the planning and implementation of the surge and the subsequent drawdown of US troops; to corrupt political elites who use sectarianism to mobilize support; and to the takeover of a third of the country by the Islamic State.

Called the 'modern-day Gertrude Bell' by The Times, Sky provides unique insights into the US military, and the complexities, diversity and evolution of Iraqi society. With sharp detail, tremendous empathy and respect for those who served - The Unravelling is an intimate portrait of how and why the Iraq adventure failed despite the best and often heroic efforts of its young men and women on the ground.

https://www.thebailliegiffordprize.co.uk/books-and-authors/the-unravelling-by-emma-sky

2015 Shortlist
Landmarks is Robert Macfarlane's joyous meditation on words, landscape and the relationship between the two. Words are grained into our landscapes, and landscapes are grained into our words. Landmarks is about the power of language to shape our sense of place. It is a field guide to the literature of nature, and a glossary containing thousands of remarkable words used in England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales to describe land, nature and weather. Travelling from Cumbria to the Cairngorms, and exploring the landscapes of Roger Deakin, J. A. Baker, Nan Shepherd and others, Robert Macfarlane shows that language, well used, is a keen way of knowing landscape, and a vital means of coming to love it.

https://www.thebailliegiffordprize.co.uk/books-and-authors/landmarks-by-robert-macfarlane

2015 Shortlist
In the summer of 2009, the leader of the dreaded Tamil Tiger guerrillas was killed, bringing to a bloody end the stubborn and complicated civil war in Sri Lanka. For nearly thirty years, the war's fingers had reached everywhere: into the bustle of Colombo, the Buddhist monasteries scattered across the island, the soft hills of central Sri Lanka, the curves of the eastern coast near Batticaloa and Trincomalee, and the stark, hot north. With its genius for brutality, the war left few places, and fewer people, untouched.

What happens to the texture of life in a country that endures such bitter conflict? What happens to the country's soul? Samanth Subramanian gives us an extraordinary account of the Sri Lankan war and the lives it changed. Taking us to the ghosts of summers past, and to other battles from other times, he draws out the story of Sri Lanka today - an exhausted, disturbed society, still hot from the embers of the war. Through travels and conversations, he examines how people reconcile themselves to violence, how religion and state conspire, how the powerful become cruel, and how victory can be put to the task of reshaping memory and burying histories.
 
This Divided Island is a harrowing and humane investigation of a country still inflamed.

https://www.thebailliegiffordprize.co.uk/books-and-authors/this-divided-island-by-samanth-subramanian

2016 Winner
When international lawyer Philippe Sands received an invitation to deliver a lecture in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv, he began to uncover a series of extraordinary historical coincidences. It set him on a quest that would take him halfway around the world in an exploration of the origins of international law and the pursuit of his own secret family history, beginning and ending with the last day of the Nuremberg trial.

Part historical detective story, part family history, part legal thriller, Philippe Sands guides us between past and present as several interconnected stories unfold in parallel. At the heart of this book is an equally personal quest to understand the roots of international law and the concepts that have dominated Sands’ work as a lawyer. Eventually, he finds unexpected answers to his questions about his family, in this meditation on the way memory, crime and guilt leave scars across generations, and the haunting gaps left by the secrets of others.

https://www.thebailliegiffordprize.co.uk/books-and-authors/east-west-street-by-philippe-sands

2016 Shortlist
Translated by Bela Shayevich

Second-hand Time is the latest work from Svetlana Alexievich, winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature. Here she brings together the voices of dozens of witnesses to the collapse of the USSR in an attempt to chart the disappearance of a culture and to surmise what new kind of man may emerge from the rubble. She fashions a singular literary form by combining extended individual monologues into a collage of voices. Alexievich creates a requiem to a civilization in ruins, a portrait of post-Soviet society out of the stories of ordinary women and men.

https://www.thebailliegiffordprize.co.uk/books-and-authors/second-hand-time-by-svetlana-alexievich

2016 Shortlist
The daughter of a successful paediatrician and a fashionable socialite, Margo Jefferson spent her childhood among Chicago's black elite. She calls this society 'Negroland': 'a small region of Negro America where residents were sheltered by a certain amount of privilege and plenty'. With privilege came expectation. Reckoning with the strictures and demands of Negroland at crucial historical moments - the civil rights movement, the dawn of feminism, the fallacy of post-racial America - Jefferson charts the twists and turns of a life informed by psychological and moral contradictions.

2016 Shortlist
Hisham Matar was nineteen when his father was kidnapped and taken to prison in Libya. He would never see him again. Twenty-two years later, the fall of Gaddafi meant he was finally able to return to his homeland.

In this memoir, the author takes us on an illuminating journey, both physical and psychological; a journey to find his father and rediscover his country.

The Return is a meditation on how history and politics can bear down on an individual life. And yet Hisham Matar's memoir isn't just about the burden of the past, but the consolation of love, literature and art. It is the story of what it is to be human.

https://www.thebailliegiffordprize.co.uk/books-and-authors/the-return-fathers-sons-and-the-land-in-between-by-hisham-matar

2017 Winner
Not since the publication of Randy Shilts’s And the Band Played On in 1987 has a book sought to measure the AIDS plague in such brutally human, intimate, and soaring terms.

David France, a chronicler of AIDS from the earliest days, uses his unparalleled access to the community to illuminate the lives of dozens of extraordinary characters, including the closeted Wall Street trader-turned-activist; the high-school dropout who found purpose battling pharmaceutical giants in New York; the South African physician who helped establish the first officially recognized buyers’ club at the height of the epidemic; and the public relations executive fighting to save his own life for the sake of his young daughter.

Expansive yet richly detailed, this is an insider’s account of a pivotal moment in twentieth-century history – and one that changed the way that medical science is practised worldwide.

https://www.thebailliegiffordprize.co.uk/books-and-authors/how-to-survive-a-plague-by-david-france

2017 Shortlist
The Muslim world has often been accused of a failure to modernise, reform and adapt. But, from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the present day, Islamic society in its Middle Eastern heartlands has in fact been transformed by modern ideals and practices, including the adoption of modern medicine, the emergence of women from purdah and the development of democracy.

This book tells the forgotten story of the Islamic Enlightenment. It shows us how to look beyond sensationalist headlines to foster a genuine understanding of modern Islam and Muslim culture, and is essential reading for anyone engaged with the state of the world today.

https://www.thebailliegiffordprize.co.uk/books-and-authors/the-islamic-enlightenment-by-christopher-de-bellaigue

2017 Shortlist
When Kapka Kassabova was a child, the borderzone between Bulgaria, Turkey and Greece was rumoured to be an easier crossing point into the West than the Berlin Wall so it swarmed with soldiers, spies and fugitives. On holidays close to the border on the Black Sea coast, she remembers playing on the beach, only miles from where an electrified fence bristled, its barbs pointing inwards toward the enemy: the holiday-makers, the potential escapees.

Today, this densely forested landscape is no longer heavily militarised, but it is scarred by its past. In Border, Kapka Kassabova sets out on a journey to meet the people of this triple border - Bulgarians, Turks, Greeks, and the latest wave of refugees fleeing conflict further afield.  She discovers a region that has been shaped by the successive forces of history: by its own past migration crises, by communism, by two World Wars, by the Ottoman Empire, and - older still - by the ancient legacy of myths and legends.

Border is a sharply observed portrait of a little-known corner of Europe, and a fascinating meditation on the borderlines that exist between countries, between cultures, between people, and within each of us.

https://www.thebailliegiffordprize.co.uk/books-and-authors/border-by-kapka-kassabova