The Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction announces Helen Garner as the 2025 winner

How to End a Story: Collected Diaries by Helen Garner is tonight named winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction 2025. The winner was announced by Chair of Judges, Robbie Millen, at a ceremony hosted at BMA House in London, UK, and generously supported by The Blavatnik Family Foundation. The announcement was streamed to readers around the world via the Baillie Gifford Prize social media channels.  

Since its founding as the Samuel Johnson Prize in 1999, this is the first time the prize has been awarded to a diary, with chair Robbie Millen noting that she takes the form “mixing the intimate, the intellectual, and the everyday, to new heights.”

This marks Garner’s first major prize victory in the UK. Recognised as one of the great Australian writers, Garner is the recipient of the 2023 Australian Society of Authors Medal, 2019 Australia Council Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature, the 2016 Windham-Campbell Literature Prize and the 2006 inaugural Melbourne Prize for Literature. Helen Garner is beloved amongst the leading cultural figures of today, from David Nicholls (“There are very few writers that I admire more than Helen Garner”), to Dua Lipa (“Helen Garner’s work is a thrilling discovery. She’s one of the most fascinating writers I have come across in years.”).

How to End a Story is a volume of Garner’s inimitable diary entries, from the early stages of her career in bohemian Melbourne, publishing her debut novel while raising a young daughter in the 1970s; the throes of an all-consuming love affair in the 1980s; and clinging to a disintegrating marriage in the 1990s. Told with devastating honesty, steel-sharp wit and an ecstatic attention to the details of everyday life, this year’s Baillie Gifford Prize-winning book reveals the inner life of a woman in love, a mother, a friend and a formidable writer at work.

How to End a Story has received widespread critical acclaim, with The Observer’s Rachel Cooke stating that, “these are the greatest, richest journals by a writer since Virginia Woolf’s”; The New York Times’ Dwight Garner puts it, “[Garner’s] prose is clear, honest, and economical; take it or leave it, in the Australian manner”; in the Financial Times, Lucy Scholes wrote, “How to End a Story places the Australian pioneer of autofiction firmly among the great chroniclers of daily life”.

The Baillie Gifford Prize recognises and rewards the best of non-fiction and is open to authors of any nationality. As the winner, Helen Garner will receive £50,000, with the other shortlisted authors each receiving £5,000, bringing the total prize value to £75,000.  

The winner was chosen by this year’s judging panel: Robbie Millen, literary editor of The Times and The Sunday Times (chair); historian and author, Pratinav Anil; journalist and broadcaster, Inaya Folarin Iman; cultural historian, biographer and novelist, and previous winner of the prize, Lucy Hughes-Hallett; deputy culture editor of The Economist, Rachel Lloyd; and author and biographer, Peter Parker.  

Their selection was made from over 350 books published between 1 November 2024 and 31 October 2025.