Archive Collection
Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction Winners
1999–2025
The Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction — formerly known as the Samuel Johnson Prize — is the UK's most prestigious award for non-fiction writing. Awarded annually since 1999, it celebrates books that reshape how we understand the world.
About the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction
- Awarded by
- Baillie Gifford, formerly the Samuel Johnson Prize
- First awarded
- 1999
- Country
- United Kingdom
- Winner receives
- £50,000
When it is announced
The winner is announced in November, after a longlist in September and a shortlist in October. See the full announcement calendar.
How to enter
Publishers submit. Eligible books are works of nonfiction published in the UK in the prize year, across current affairs, history, science, biography and more.
Official prize site · Checked August 2026. Dates move year to year, so confirm on the official site before entering.
| Year | Title & Author | Historical Context |
|---|---|---|
| 2025 | How to End a Story | How to End a Story won the Baillie Gifford Prize in 2025, the first diaries ever to take the award, with all six judges calling the book remarkable… |
| 2024 | Question 7 | Question 7 won the Baillie Gifford Prize in 2024, and the moment produced two firsts. Richard Flanagan, whose The Narrow Road to the Deep North, the… |
| 2023 | Fire Weather | Fire Weather won the Baillie Gifford Prize in 2023 and was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer, the rare climate book to… |
| 2022 | Super-Infinite | Super-Infinite won the Baillie Gifford Prize in 2022, the judges praising its irresistible case for Donne's electric joy four hundred years on.… |
| 2021 | Empire of Pain | Empire of Pain won the Baillie Gifford Prize in 2021, judges praising how immersive and unputdownable he made the telling, and it was a bestseller… |
| 2020 | One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time | One Two Three Four won the Baillie Gifford Prize in 2020, the judges calling it a joyous, irreverent celebration of the Beatles and a profound book… |
| 2019 | The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper | The Five won the Baillie Gifford Prize in 2019, the first year of its enlarged fifty thousand pound purse, and became a bestseller whose argument… |
| 2018 | Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy | Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy won the Baillie Gifford Prize in 2018, the judges calling it a horror story of political cynicism and scientific… |
| 2017 | How to Survive a Plague | How to Survive a Plague won the Baillie Gifford Prize in 2017. It grew out of France's Oscar nominated 2012 documentary of the same name, the book… |
| 2016 | East West Street | East West Street won the Baillie Gifford Prize in 2016, the first year the Samuel Johnson carried its new sponsor's name, and swept on to the Jewish… |
| 2015 | NeuroTribes | NeuroTribes won the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2015, the first popular science book to take the award in its seventeen years. It grew from The Geek… |
| 2014 | H Is for Hawk | H Is for Hawk won the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2014 and then the Costa Book of the Year across all categories, a double almost never achieved, and… |
| 2013 | The Pike | The Pike won the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2013 and completed a rare sweep: the Costa Biography Award and the Duff Cooper Prize in the same season.… |
| 2012 | Into the Silence | Into the Silence won the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2012 after more than a decade of work, and was later shortlisted for the prize's Winner of Winners… |
| 2011 | Mao's Great Famine | Mao's Great Famine won the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2011, judges calling it stunningly original, and it carried the famine, long a specialist subject,… |
| 2010 | Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea | Nothing to Envy won the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2010 and was a National Book Award finalist in America, and it has settled since into the small shelf… |
| 2009 | Leviathan or, The Whale | Leviathan or, The Whale won the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2009, the judges saying that what set it apart was precisely the lifelong passion and the… |
| 2008 | The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher | The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher won the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2008 and became that rarest thing for the award, a genuine mass bestseller, the year's… |
| 2007 | Imperial Life in the Emerald City | Imperial Life in the Emerald City won the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2007, its judges' choice registered a public mood: by 2007 the question was no… |
| 2006 | 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare | 1599 won the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2006, and then, remarkably, won the whole prize again: in 2023, for the award's twenty fifth anniversary, a… |
| 2005 | Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of B.S. Johnson | Published in 2004, Like a Fiery Elephant won the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non Fiction in 2005, the award now known as the Baillie Gifford Prize. D.J.… |
| 2004 | Stasiland | Stasiland won the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2004, an Australian debut beating the year's established names, and the Guardian's early review found it… |
| 2003 | Pushkin: A Biography | Pushkin: A Biography won the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2003, a win with a pleasing shape: the year of the prize's own Johnson, a scholar's decades on a… |
| 2002 | Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World | Paris 1919 won the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2002, along with the Duff Cooper Prize and a shelf of others, and it made Margaret MacMillan, then a… |
| 2001 | The Third Reich: A New History | The Third Reich: A New History won the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2001, the judges calling it urgent and magisterial and a work of authentic historical… |
| 2000 | Berlioz: Servitude and Greatness | Berlioz: Servitude and Greatness won the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2000, the award's second year, and it remains the only music biography to win. It… |
| 1999 | Stalingrad | Stalingrad won the first Samuel Johnson Prize in 1999, the award that is now the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non Fiction, and took the Wolfson History… |