The shortlist for the Baillie Gifford Winner of Winners Award – which celebrates the prize’s 25th anniversary – has been revealed, featuring titles by Craig Brown, Wade Davis and Barbara Demick.

The six-strong shortlist was selected from the previous 24 award winners, with works spanning 18 years of the prize’s history from 2002 to 2020.

Originally known as the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-fiction, the first award was presented in 1999 to Antony Beevor for his book Stalingrad. 

The £25,000 cash prize will be awarded to one of the six books of “high ambition, formal innovation and thrilling originality”. The shortlist spans history, narrative-driven reportage, investigative journalism, and literary and cultural biography.

New Statesman Editor-in-Chief and Chair of Judges Jason Cowley commented: “We are delighted with the range and quality of our shortlist, which showcases the best of this great prize and features works of high ambition, formal innovation and originality – works of history, narrative-driven reportage, investigative journalism, and literary and cultural biography.”

The Shortlist:

Craig Brown – the only British writer on the shortlist – was nominated for One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time, the 2020 Winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize. The Beatles biography was described by the judges as “irreverent and yet profound, biographical and yet fantastical”.

Wade Davis was nominated for his book Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest, which details climber George Mallory’s quest for Mount Everest.

Barbara Demick reaches the shortlist with Nothing to Envy Real Lives in North Korea which follows the lives of six residents in Chongin, North Korea’s third-largest city. She has been interviewing North Koreans about their lives since 2001, when she moved to Seoul for the Los Angeles Times.

Patrick Radden Keefe's 2021 winner Empire of Pain was celebrated as a “compelling, meticulously researched and deeply reported” analysis of opioid addiction in the US, charted through the rise and fall of the Sackler family.

Margaret MacMillan is up for Paris 1919, which the judges said reframes the readers understanding of the Treaty of Versailles.

James Shapiro’s internationally acclaimed 1599 A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare also makes the shortlist, being lauded as a “superbly original” biography of the famed writer.

The winner of the prize will be announced on Thursday 27th April at an event at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh.