Baillie Gifford Prize announces book shortlist amid controversy

Britain’s leading nonfiction prize has announced its annual shortlist. Is it enough to overcome the bad press Baillie Gifford has faced this year due to its investments?

Founded in 1999, the Baillie Gifford Prize recognizes English-language books from any country in current affairs, history, politics, science, sport, travel, biography, autobiography and the arts. It has been credited with bringing an eclectic slate of fact-based books to a wider audience.
As the nominations have been released for the 2024 edition of the prize, the highly-coveted award might be overshadowed by the media storm the Scottish investment firm has faced over the past year.
Baillie Gifford entered the public eye in August 2023 when over 50 authors threatened to boycott the Edinburgh Book Festival over its investments in corporations that profit from fossil fuels.
At the time, it was reported that the firm had around £4.5 billion (€5.3 billion) invested in companies involved in oil and gas money. Baillie Gifford has sponsored many of the major literary festivals around the UK in recent years, including the Hay, Borders, and Cheltenham Book Festivals, alongside Edinburgh Book Festival and Fringe Festival.
After the Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip following the October 7 attacks by Hamas last year, the boycott, championed by pressure group Fossil Free Books, has also demand that Baillie Gifford also divest “from companies that profit from Israeli apartheid, occupation and genocide.”
Fossil Free Books’s pressure has succeeded to make the Hay Festival, Edinburgh International Book Festival, Wigtown Book Festival, and Borders Book Festival end their partnerships with Baillie Gifford.
The Edinburgh Fringe Festival also came under pressure from Fossil Free Books, but CEO Shona McCarthy and the Fringe board voted to maintain the partnership.
This week, the Ferret, a Scottish news company, criticised Baillie Gifford for their £17 million (€20.3 million) investment in AeroVironment, “a US company that makes drones loaded with explosives to destroy ground targets.”
A chilling, thriller-like account of how a nuclear war might unfold and two award-winning novelists are among finalists announced Thursday for Britain’s nonfiction book prize.
American writer Annie Jacobsen’s “Nuclear War: A Scenario” is one of six books shortlisted for the £50,000 (€59,700) Baillie Gifford Prize. The book, which the judging panel called “deeply researched and terrifying,” offers a minute-by-minute account of what might happen if a rogue state launched nuclear missiles at the Pentagon.
Australia’s Richard Flanagan, best known as a novelist, is a finalist for his memoir “Question 7”. Flanagan won the Booker Prize for fiction in 2014 for his novel “The Narrow Road to the Deep North”.
US writer Viet Thanh Nguyen, who won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction with his novel “The Sympathizer”, made the list with the autobiographical “A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, A History, A Memorial”.
The other Baillie Gifford Prize contenders are British biographer Sue Prideaux’s “Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin”, Belgian author David Van Reybrouck’s decolonisation history “Revolusi: Indonesia and the Birth of the Modern World” and British doctor Rachel Clarke’s medical journey “The Story of a Heart”.
Last year’s winner was John Vaillant’s real-life climate-change thriller “Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World”.
The winner will be crowned on 19 November at a ceremony in London.