Richard Flanagan was last night announced as the winner of the £50,000 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction 2024 for Question 7. The Baillie Gifford Prize rewards excellence in non-fiction writing, bringing the best in intelligent reflection on the world to new readers. It covers all non-fiction in the areas of current affairs, history, politics, science, sport, travel, biography, autobiography and the arts. The award celebrates the best in contemporary non-fiction writing.

The Chair of the Judges, Isabel Hilton, announced the winner at a ceremony hosted at BMA House in London supported by The Blavatnik Family Foundation. She described the book as “an astonishingly accomplished meditation on memory, history, trauma, love and death – and an intricately woven exploration of the chains of consequence that frame a life".

By way of H. G. Wells and Rebecca West's affair, through 1930s nuclear physics, to Flanagan's father working as a slave labourer near Hiroshima when the atom bomb is dropped, this daisy chain of events reaches fission when a young man finds himself trapped in a rapid on a wild river, not knowing if he is to live or to die. Flanagan has created a love song to his island home and his parents and the terrible past that delivered him to that place.

Through a hypnotic melding of dream, history, science, and memory, Question 7 shows how our lives so often arise out of the stories of others and the stories we invent about ourselves.

The 26th edition of the Prize sees an author who was the first to 'win the double' of the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction and the Booker Prize for Fiction, and a shortlist that tackled issues from colonialism to migration, and organ donation to nuclear war, confronting our past and its ongoing impact in an original and daring way.

However, in his acceptance speech, Flanagan said he would not accept the Prize money until he had the chance to meet with Baillie Gifford’s board, to offer "a perspective that may otherwise be absent from their executive discussions". 

The winning author said that he wanted to speak with the funders of the prize "both to thank them for their generosity and also to describe how fossil fuels are destroying my country". Before accepting the prize money, he urged Baillie Gifford to demonstrate "a plan to reduce its already minimal direct investment in fossil fuel extraction, and increase its investments in renewables".

View this year's full Shortlist.

@BGPrize