The Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction announces Helen Garner as the 2025 winner
4 November 2025
How to End a Story
Collected Diaries
Helen Garner
Helen Garner has kept a diary for most of her adult life. Recognised as one of the great Australian writers, but of all her books, it is her diaries that she likes best. Collected for the first time into one volume, these inimitable diaries show Garner like never before: as a fledging author in bohemian Melbourne, publishing her lightning-rod debut novel while raising a young daughter in the 1970s; in the throes of an all-consuming love affair in the 1980s; and clinging to a disintegrating marriage in the 1990s.
How to End a Story reveals the inner life of a woman in love, a mother, a friend and a formidable writer at work. Told with devastating honesty, steel-sharp wit and an ecstatic attention to the details of everyday life, it offers all the satisfactions of a novel alongside the enthralling intimacy of something written in private and just for pleasure.
- Published by:
- Weidenfeld & Nicolson, The Orion Publishing Group
What the judges said“Garner’s candid, pacey diary chronicles the end of her second marriage and the challenges of being a writer. There is a skilled narrative drive which presents a lot of personal material that keeps you hooked, not necessarily on what is happening in terms of the story, but about Garner's whole life and about what's going on outside her window.”
About the author
Helen Garner was born in Geelong in 1942. She worked as a high school teacher, then as a freelance journalist. Since 1977 she has published novels, stories, screenplays and works of non-fiction. She is the winner of the 2006 inaugural Melbourne Prize for Literature, the 2016 Windham-Campbell Literature Prize for Non-fiction, the 2019 Australia Council Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature and the 2023 Australian Society of Authors Medal. Her books include This House of Grief, Monkey Grip and The Children's Bach.
