The Prize announces 2025 shortlist

Jason Burke, Helen Garner, Richard Holmes, Justin Marozzi, Adam Weymouth and Frances Wilson have today (Thursday 2 October 2025) been announced as the six authors shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction 2025.  

The prize recognises and rewards the best of non-fiction and is open to authors of any nationality. It covers all non-fiction in the areas of current affairs, history, politics, science, sport, travel, biography, autobiography and the arts. The winning author will receive £50,000, with the other shortlisted authors receiving £5,000, bringing the total prize value to £75,000.  

The shortlist of six books were 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.

The titles on this year’s shortlist are:  

Jason Burke (British) The Revolutionists: The Story of the Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970s (The Bodley Head, Vintage, Penguin Random House (UK/Australia) / Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group (U.S.))

Helen Garner (Australian) How to End a Story: Collected Diaries (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, The Orion Publishing Group (UK) / Pantheon (U.S.) / The Text Publishing Company (Australia))

Richard Holmes (British) The Boundless Deep: Young Tennyson, Science and the Crisis of Belief (William Collins, HarperCollins Publishers (UK / /Australia) / Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group (U.S.)) 

Justin Marozzi (British) Captives and Companions: A History of Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Islamic World (Allen Lane, Penguin Books (UK/Australia) / Pegasus Books, Simon & Schuster (U.S.))

Adam Weymouth (British) Lone Wolf: Walking the Faultlines of Europe (Hutchinson Heinemann, Cornerstone, Penguin Random House (UK/Australia) / Crown Publishing Group (U.S.))

Frances Wilson (British) Electric Spark: The Enigma of Muriel Spark (Bloomsbury Circus, Bloomsbury Publishing (UK/Australia) / Farrar, Straus & Giroux (U.S.)) 

Robbie Millen, chair of judges, says: 

“Formidable female novelists, ghastly literary men, a faith-shaken poet, eunuchs, pirates, horny wolves, international terrorists. This is who the judges have been spending time with. And what good company. The six books on this year's shortlist have real breadth in terms of subject matter and style. We have been delighted by the candour and courage displayed by the sextet, by the wit and scintillating prose, by their confidence and impressive command of their subjects.  It's a shortlist that will be bold company in the darkening autumn evenings.” 

Two authors are recognised by the prize for a third time, both of whom have written exhilarating biographies: Richard Holmes (shortlisted in 1999 and 2009) and Frances Wilson (longlisted in 2016 and 2021). In Holmes’ extraordinary biography The Boundless Deep: Young Tennyson, Science and the Crisis of Belief, we witness Alfred, Lord Tennyson wrestling with mind-altering ideas about geology and deep time, the vastness, beauty, and terror of the new cosmology, and the challenges of social revolution. Tennyson’s wild imagination and deep engagement with these concepts helped him emerge as the poetic voice of his generation. 

In Electric Spark, Frances Wilson explores not the celebrated Dame Muriel but the apprentice mage discovering her powers. We return to her early years when everything was piled on: divorce, madness, murder, espionage, poverty, skulduggery, blackmail, love affairs, revenge, and a major religious conversion. If this sounds like a novel by Muriel Spark it is because the experiences of the 1940s and 1950s became, alchemically reduced, the material of her art.

Included in this year’s shortlist are the collected diaries of one of Australia’s greatest writers, Helen Garner. How to End a Story are the inimitable diary entries that show Garner like never before and reveal 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.  

A remarkable collection of historical human tragedy is recounted In Captives and Companions: A History of Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Islamic World, an extraordinary synthesis of contemporary reportage. Justin Marozzi traces the variety of enslavement in the Islamic world, which brings to life voices from the eighth to the twentieth centuries in stories from Baghdad to Bamako, Tripoli to Timbuktu and Istanbul to the Black Sea.  

Another sweeping and extensively researched historical narrative is The Revolutionists: The Story of the Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970s. Set against the backdrop of the Cold War and packed with revelations about iconic events such as the deadly attack on the Munich Olympic, Israel’s raid on Entebbe, the Iranian revolution and the rise of Islamic extremism, Jason Burke takes us into the lives and minds of the perpetrators of the deadly operations in the West in the 1970s.  

Finally, Weymouth’s Lone Wolf throws a unique light on Europe's mountainous hinterlands at a moment of political and environmental change, by documenting an epic walk across the Alps in the footsteps of a young wolf from Slovenia to the north of Verona, examining the changes facing these corners of Europe. The result is a multifaceted account of a region caught in a moment of kaleidoscopic flux.

The shortlisted authors will be interviewed on The Baillie Gifford Prize Read Smart podcast, generously supported by the Blavatnik Family Foundation. All previous episodes are available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and SoundCloud.