Garner shortlisted for Baillie Gifford Prize

How to End a Story: Collected Diaries by Australian author Helen Garner (Text) has been shortlisted for the 2025 Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction in the UK.

Selected from a longlist announced last month, the full shortlist includes:

• The Boundless Deep: Young Tennyson, Science and the Crisis of Belief (Richard Holmes, HarperCollins)
• Captives and Companions: A History of Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Islamic World (Justin Marozzi, Allen Lane)
• Electric Spark: The Enigma of Muriel Spark (Frances Wilson, Bloomsbury Circus)
• How to End a Story: Collected Diaries (Helen Garner, Text)
• Lone Wolf: Walking the Faultlines of Europe (Adam Weymouth, Hutchinson Heinemann)
• The Revolutionists: The Story of the Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970s (Jason Burke, Bodley Head).

All works of nonfiction by authors of any nationality are eligible for the £50,000 (A$101,861) award, which is the richest prize for nonfiction in the UK.

Last year’s winner was Australian author Richard Flanagan for Question 7 (Knopf). Flanagan declined to accept the cash prize associated with the award, citing the sponsor’s investment in fossil fuels.

The 2025 winner is set to be announced on 4 November.

More information about the shortlist is available on the prize website.

Category: Local news