Baillie Gifford Prize

The Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction, formerly the Samuel Johnson Prize, is an annual British book prize for the best non-fiction writing in the English language. It was founded in 1999 following the demise of the NCR Book Award. With its motto "All the best stories are true", the prize covers current affairs, history, politics, science, sport, travel, biography, autobiography and the arts. The competition is open to authors of any nationality whose work is published in the UK in English.^[1] The longlist, shortlist and winner is chosen by a panel of independent judges, which changes every year. Formerly named after English author and lexicographer Samuel Johnson, the award was renamed in 2015 after Baillie Gifford, an investment management firm and the primary sponsor. Since 2016, the annual dinner and awards ceremony has been sponsored by the Blavatnik Family Foundation.

Baillie Gifford Prize
Awarded for	Non-fiction writing
Date	1999; 26 years ago (1999)
Country	United Kingdom
Formerly called	Samuel Johnson Prize
Reward(s)	£50,000
Currently held by	Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World by John Vaillant
Website	thebailliegiffordprize.co.uk

The prize is governed by the Board of Directors of The Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-fiction Limited, a not-for-profit company. Since 2018, the Chair of the Board has been Sir Peter Bazalgette, who succeeded Stuart Proffitt, the chair since 1999. In 2015, Toby Mundy was appointed as the Prize's first director.^[2]

History

Prior to the establishment of the Samuel Johnson Prize, Britain's premier literary award for non-fiction was the NCR Book Award, which had been established in 1987.^[3] In 1997, the NCR Award experienced a scandal when it was revealed the judges, many of them chosen for their popularity rather than literary qualities, had used "ghost readers" and were not expected to read the books they voted on.^[4] Because of this and other problems the award ceased operations.^[4] In response, one of the previous winners of NCR Award, the historian Peter Hennessy, approached Stuart Proffitt, a Publishing Director at Penguin Press, with the idea for a new award. An anonymous benefactor was found who funded the establishment of the Prize,^[3] which was named after the English 18th-century author and lexicographer Samuel Johnson.

From its inception until 2001, the prize was independently financed by the founding benefactor.^[3] In 2002, it was taken over by the BBC and re-named the BBC Four Samuel Johnson Prize and managed by BBC Four.^[3] In 2009, the name was amended to the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction^[5] and managed by BBC Two. The new name reflected the BBC's commitment to broadcasting coverage of the Prize on the BBC2 programme, The Culture Show.^[5] In 2016, the name was changed to the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction, after its new primary sponsor, the Edinburgh-based investment management company Baillie Gifford.^[6]

Prior to the 2009 name change, the winner received £30,000, and each finalist received £2,500. After 2009, the award was £20,000 for the winner, and each finalist received £1,000.^[5] In February 2012, the steering committee for the prize announced that a new sponsor had been found for the prize, an anonymous philanthropist, enabling the prize money to be raised to £25,000.^[7] In 2015, funding for the prize was arranged by the Blavatnik Family Foundation, while the organisers sought new primary sponsors from 2016 onwards.^[8]

In 2016, under new sponsors Baillie Gifford, the prize money was restored to £30,000 for the winner.

In 2019, following the announcement that Baillie Gifford will sponsor the award until at least 2026, the prize money was increased to £50,000.^[9]

It is widely recognised as the UK's most prestigious award for non-fiction authors.^[10]

Winners and shortlists

1990s

1990s Samuel Johnson Prize winners and shortlists

Year	Author	Title	Result	Ref.
1999[a]	Antony Beevor	Stalingrad	Won	[11]
	Ian Kershaw	Hitler 1889–1936: Hubris (about Adolf Hitler)	Shortlisted	[12]
	Ann Wroe	Pilate: The Biography of an Invented Man (about Pontius Pilate)	Shortlisted	[12]
	John Diamond	C: Because Cowards Get Cancer Too	Shortlisted	[12]
	Richard Holmes	Coleridge: Darker Reflections (about Samuel Taylor Coleridge)	Shortlisted	[12]
	David Landes	The Wealth and Poverty of Nations	Shortlisted	[12]

2000s

2000s Samuel Johnson Prize winners and shortlists

Year	Author	Title	Result	Ref.
2000[b]	David Cairns	Berlioz: Volume 2	Won	[11]
	Tony Hawks	Playing the Moldovans at Tennis	Shortlisted	[13]
	Brenda Maddox	Yeats's Ghosts: The Secret Life of W. B. Yeats (about W. B. Yeats)	Shortlisted	[13]
	Matt Ridley	Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters	Shortlisted	[13]
	William Shawcross	Deliver us from Evil: Warlords, Peacekeepers and a World of Endless Conflict	Shortlisted	[13]
	Francis Wheen	Karl Marx (about Karl Marx)	Shortlisted	[13]
2001[c]	Michael Burleigh	The Third Reich: A New History	Won	[11]
	Richard Fortey	Trilobite!: Eyewitness to Evolution	Shortlisted	[14]
	Catherine Merridale	Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Russia	Shortlisted	[14]
	Graham Robb	Rimbaud (about Arthur Rimbaud)	Shortlisted	[14]
	Simon Sebag Montefiore	Prince of Princes: The Life of Potemkin (about Grigory Potemkin)	Shortlisted	[14]
	Robert Skidelsky	John Maynard Keynes: Fighting for Britain, 1937–1946 (about John Maynard Keynes)	Shortlisted	[14]
2002[d]	Margaret MacMillan	Peacemakers: The Paris Peace Conference of 1919 and Its Attempt to End War	Won	[11]
	Eamon Duffy	The Voices of Morebath: Reformation and Rebellion in an English Village	Shortlisted	[15]
	William Fiennes	The Snow Geese	Shortlisted	[15]
	Richard Hamblyn	The Invention of Clouds: How an Amateur Meteorologist Forged the Language of the Skies	Shortlisted	[15]
	Roy Jenkins	Churchill: a Biography (about Winston Churchill)	Shortlisted	[15]
	Brendan Simms	Unfinest Hour: Britain and the Destruction of Bosnia	Shortlisted	[15]
2003[e]	T. J. Binyon	Pushkin: A Biography (about Alexander Pushkin)	Won	[11]
	Orlando Figes	Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia	Shortlisted	[16]
	Aminatta Forna	The Devil that Danced on the Water: A Daughter's Memoir of her Father, her Family, her Country and a Continent	Shortlisted	[16]
	Olivia Judson	Dr Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation: The Definitive Guide to the Evolutionary Biology of Sex	Shortlisted	[16]
	Claire Tomalin	Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self	Shortlisted	[16]
	Edgar Vincent	Nelson: Love and Fame (about Lord Nelson)	Shortlisted	[16]
2004[f]	Anna Funder	Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall	Won	[11]
	Anne Applebaum	Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps	Shortlisted	[17]
	Jonathan Bate	John Clare: A Biography (about John Clare)	Shortlisted	[17]
	Bill Bryson	A Short History of Nearly Everything	Shortlisted	[17]
	Aidan Hartley	The Zanzibar Chest: A Memoir of Love and War	Shortlisted	[17]
	Tom Holland	Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic	Shortlisted	[17]
2005[g]	Jonathan Coe	Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of B. S. Johnson (about B. S. Johnson)	Won	[11]
	Alexander Masters	Stuart: A Life Backwards	Shortlisted	[18]
	Suketu Mehta	Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found	Shortlisted	[18]
	Orhan Pamuk	Istanbul: Memories and the City	Shortlisted	[18]
	Hilary Spurling	Matisse the Master: The Conquest of Colour 1909–1954 (about Henri Matisse)	Shortlisted	[18]
	Sarah Wise	The Italian Boy: Murder and Grave-Robbery in 1830s London	Shortlisted	[18]
2006[h]	James S. Shapiro	1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare	Won	[11]
	Alan Bennett	Untold Stories	Shortlisted	[19]
	Jerry Brotton	The Sale of the Late King's Goods: Charles I and His Art Collection	Shortlisted	[19]
	Carmen Callil	Bad Faith: A Forgotten History of Family & Fatherland	Shortlisted	[19]
	Tony Judt	Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945	Shortlisted	[19]
	Tom Reiss	The Orientalist: In Search of a Man Caught Between East and West	Shortlisted	[19]
2007[i]	Rajiv Chandrasekaran	Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone	Won	[20]
	Ian Buruma	Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo Van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance	Shortlisted	[21]
	Peter Hennessy	Having It So Good: Britain in the Fifties	Shortlisted	[21]
	Georgina Howell	Daughter of the Desert: The Extraordinary Life of Gertrude Bell (about Gertrude Bell)	Shortlisted	[21]
	Dominic Streatfeild	Brainwash: The Secret History of Mind Control	Shortlisted	[21]
	Adrian Tinniswood	The Verneys: A True Story of Love, War, and Madness in Seventeenth-Century England	Shortlisted	[21]
2008[j]	Kate Summerscale	The Suspicions of Mr Whicher or the Murder at Road Hill House	Won	[22]
	Tim Butcher	Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart	Shortlisted	[23]
	Mark Cocker	Crow Country	Shortlisted	[23]
	Orlando Figes	The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia	Shortlisted	[23]
	Patrick French	The World Is What It Is: The Authorised Biography of VS Naipaul (about V. S. Naipaul)	Shortlisted	[23]
	Alex Ross	The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century	Shortlisted	[23]
2009[k]	Philip Hoare	Leviathan or, The Whale	Won	[24][25]
	Liaquat Ahamed	Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World	Shortlisted	[26]
	Ben Goldacre	Bad Science	Shortlisted	[26]
	David Grann	The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon	Shortlisted	[26]
	Richard Holmes	The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science	Shortlisted	[26]
	Manjit Kumar	Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate about the Nature of Reality	Shortlisted	[26]

2010s

2010s Baillie Gifford Prize winner and shortlist

Year	Author	Title	Result	Ref.
2010[l]	Barbara Demick	Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea	Won	[27]
	Alex Bellos	Alex's Adventures in Numberland: Dispatches from the Wonderful World of Mathematics	Shortlisted	[28]
	Luke Jennings	Blood Knots: On Fathers, Friendship and Fishing	Shortlisted	[28]
	Andrew Ross Sorkin	Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System—and Themselves	Shortlisted	[28]
	Jenny Uglow	A Gambling Man: Charles II and the Restoration	Shortlisted	[28]
	Richard Wrangham	Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human	Shortlisted	[28]
2011[m]	Frank Dikötter	Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958–1962	Won	[29]
	Andrew Graham-Dixon	Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane (biography of Caravaggio)	Shortlisted	[30]
	Maya Jasanoff	Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World	Shortlisted	[30]
	Matt Ridley	The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves	Shortlisted	[30]
	Jonathan Steinberg	Bismarck: A Life (biography of Otto von Bismarck)	Shortlisted	[30]
	John Stubbs	Reprobates: The Cavaliers of the English Civil War	Shortlisted	[30]
2012[n]	Wade Davis	Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest	Won	[31]
	Katherine Boo	Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Slum	Shortlisted	[32]
	Robert Macfarlane	The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot	Shortlisted	[32]
	Steven Pinker	The Better Angels of our Nature: A History of Violence and Humanity	Shortlisted	[32]
	Paul Preston	The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain	Shortlisted	[32]
	Sue Prideaux	Strindberg: A Life (about August Strindberg)	Shortlisted	[32]
2013[o]	Lucy Hughes-Hallett	The Pike: Gabriele D'Annunzio, Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War	Won	[33]
	David Crane	Empires of the Dead: How One Man's Vision led to the Creation of WWI's World Graves	Shortlisted	[34]
	William Dalrymple	Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan	Shortlisted	[34]
	Dave Goulson	A Sting in the Tale: My Adventures with Bumblebees	Shortlisted	[34]
	Charlotte Higgins	Under Another Sky: Journeys in Roman Britain	Shortlisted	[34]
	Charles Moore	Margaret Thatcher: The Authorised Biography	Shortlisted	[34]
2014[p]	Helen Macdonald	H Is for Hawk	Won	[35][36]
	John Campbell	Roy Jenkins: A Biography (about Roy Jenkins)	Shortlisted	[37]
	Marion Coutts	The Iceberg: A Memoir	Shortlisted	[37]
	Greg Grandin	The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World	Shortlisted	[37]
	Alison Light	Common People: The History of an English Family	Shortlisted	[37]
	Caroline Moorehead	Village of Secrets: Defying the Nazis in Vichy France	Shortlisted	[37]
2015[q]	Steve Silberman	NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and How to Think Smarter About People Who Think Differently	Won	[38]
	Jonathan Bate	Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life (about Ted Hughes)	Shortlisted	[39]
	Robert Macfarlane	Landmarks	Shortlisted	[39]
	Laurence Scott	The Four-Dimensional Human: Ways of Being in the Digital World	Shortlisted	[39]
	Emma Sky	The Unravelling: High Hopes and Missed Opportunities in Iraq	Shortlisted	[39]
	Samanth Subramanian	This Divided Island: Stories from the Sri Lankan Civil War	Shortlisted	[39]
2016[r]	Philippe Sands	East West Street: On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity	Won	[40]
	Svetlana Alexievich	Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets	Shortlisted	[41][42]
	Margo Jefferson	Negroland: A Memoir	Shortlisted	[41][42]
	Hisham Matar	The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between	Shortlisted	[41][42]
2017[s]	David France	How to Survive a Plague: The Inside Story of How Citizens and Science Tamed AIDS	Won	[43][44]
	Christopher de Bellaigue	The Islamic Enlightenment The Modern Struggle Between Faith and Reason	Shortlisted	[45][46]
	Kapka Kassabova	Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe	Shortlisted	[45][46]
	Daniel Mendelsohn	An Odyssey: A Father, a Son and an Epic	Shortlisted	[45][46]
	Mark O'Connell	To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death	Shortlisted	[45][46]
	Simon Schama	Belonging: The Story of the Jews, 1492–1900	Shortlisted	[45][46]
2018[t]	Serhii Plokhy	Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy	Won	[47][48]
	Hannah Fry	Hello World: How to Be Human in the Age of the Machine	Shortlisted	[49]
	Ben Macintyre	The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War	Shortlisted	[49]
	Thomas Page McBee	Amateur: A True Story About What Makes a Man	Shortlisted	[49]
	Stephen R. Platt	Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China's Last Golden Age	Shortlisted	[49]
	Carl Zimmer	She Has Her Mother's Laugh: The Powers, Perversions and Potential of Heredity	Shortlisted	[49]
2019[u]	Hallie Rubenhold	The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper	Won	[50][51]
	Casey Cep	Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud and the Last Trial of Harper Lee	Shortlisted	[52][53]
	Laura Cumming	On Chapel Sands: My Mother and Other Missing Persons	Shortlisted	[52][53]
	William Feaver	The Lives of Lucian Freud: Youth (about Lucian Freud)	Shortlisted	[52][53]
	Julia Lovell	Maoism: A Global History	Shortlisted	[52][53]
	Azadeh Moaveni	Guest House for Young Widows: Among the Women of ISIS	Shortlisted	[52][53]

2020s

2020s Baillie Gifford Prize winner and shortlist

Year	Author	Title	Result	Ref.
2020[v]	Craig Brown	One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time	Won
	Matthew Cobb	The Idea of the Brain: A History	Shortlisted	[54][55][56]
	Sudhir Hazareesingh	Black Spartacus: The Epic Life of Toussaint Louverture	Shortlisted	[54][55][56]
	Christina Lamb	Our Bodies, Their Battlefield: What War Does to Women	Shortlisted	[54][55][56]
	Amy Stanley	Stranger in the Shogun's City: A Japanese Woman and Her World	Shortlisted	[54][55][56]
	Kate Summerscale	The Haunting of Alma Fielding: A True Ghost Story	Shortlisted	[54][55][56]
2021[w]	Patrick Radden Keefe	Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty	Won	[57][58][59]
	Cal Flyn	Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape	Shortlisted	[60][61]
	Harald Jähner	Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945–1955	Shortlisted	[60][61]
	Kei Miller	Things I Have Withheld	Shortlisted	[60][61]
	John Preston	Fall: The Mystery of Robert Maxwell (about Robert Maxwell)	Shortlisted	[60][61]
	Lea Ypi	Free: Coming of Age at the End of History	Shortlisted	[60][61]
2022[x]	Katherine Rundell	Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne (about John Donne)	Won	[62][63][64]
	Caroline Elkins	Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire	Shortlisted	[65][66][67]
	Jonathan Freedland	The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World	Shortlisted	[65][66][67]
	Sally Hayden	My Fourth Time, We Drowned: Seeking Refuge on the World's Deadliest Migration Route	Shortlisted	[65][66][67]
	Anna Keay	The Restless Republic: Britain Without a Crown	Shortlisted	[65][66][67]
	Polly Morland	A Fortunate Woman: A Country Doctor’s Story	Shortlisted	[65][66][67]
2023[y]	John Vaillant	Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World	Won	[68][69][70]
	Hannah Barnes	Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock's Gender Service for Children	Shortlisted	[68]
	Tania Branigan	Red Memory: Living, Remembering and Forgetting China's Cultural Revolution,	Shortlisted	[68]
	Christopher Clark	Revolutionary Spring: Fighting for a New World 1848–1849	Shortlisted	[68]
	Jeremy Eichler	Time's Echo: The Second World War, The Holocaust, and The Music of Remembrance	Shortlisted	[68]
	Jennifer Homans	Mr. B: George Balanchine's Twentieth Century	Shortlisted	[68]
2024[z]	Richard Flanagan	Question 7	Won	[71]
	Rachel Clarke	The Story of a Heart	Shortlisted	[72][73]
	Annie Jacobsen	Nuclear War: A Scenario	Shortlisted	[72][73]
	Viet Thanh Nguyen	A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, a History, a Memorial	Shortlisted	[72][73]
	Sue Prideaux	Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin	Shortlisted	[72][73]
	David Van Reybrouck	Revolusi: Indonesia and the Birth of the Modern World	Shortlisted	[72][73]

25th Anniversary Winner of Winners Award

In 2023, marking the 25th anniversary of the prize, a one-off 'Winner of Winners' Award was announced.^[74] The judging panel was chaired by Jason Cowley (New Statesman editor-in-chief) and included Shahidha Bari (academic, critic and broadcaster), Sarah Churchwell (journalist, author and academic), and Frances Wilson (biographer and critic).^[74]

Author	Title	Win Year	Result	Ref.
James S. Shapiro	1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare	2006	Won	[75][76]
Craig Brown	One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time	2020	Shortlisted	[77][78]
Wade Davis	Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest	2012	Shortlisted	[77][78]
Barbara Demick	Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea	2010	Shortlisted	[77][78]
Patrick Radden Keefe	Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty	2021	Shortlisted	[77][78]
Margaret MacMillan	Peacemakers: The Paris Peace Conference of 1919 and Its Attempt to End War	2002	Shortlisted	[77][78]

See also

• British literature
• English literature
• List of years in literature
• List of literary awards
• Prizes named after people

Notes

1. The 1999 judges were Cherie Booth, Orlando Figes, Kate Summerscale, James Naughtie.
2. The 2000 judges were Stephen Fry, Timothy Garton Ash, Susan Greenfield, Baroness Helena Kennedy, Nigella Lawson.
3. The 2001 judges were Niall Ferguson, Steve Jones, Annalena McAfee, Suzanna Taverne, Andrew Marr.
4. 2002 was the first year as BBC Four Samuel Johnson Prize. The 2002 judges were Richard Fortey, Caroline Gascoigne, Bonnie Greer, Robert Harris, David Dimbleby.
5. The 2003 judges were Michael Portillo, Tim Radford, Andrew Roberts, Fiammetta Rocco, Rosie Boycott.
6. The 2004 judges were Aminatta Forna, Martha Kearney, Simon Singh, Francis Wheen, Michael Wood.
7. The 2005 judges were Marcus du Sautoy, Andrew Holgate, Maria Misra, John Simpson, Sue MacGregor.
8. The 2006 judges were Robert Winston, Sir Richard Eyre, Pankaj Mishra, Cristina Odone, Michael Prodger.
9. The 2007 judges were Helena Kennedy, Diana Athill, Jim Al-Khalili, Tristram Hunt, Mark Lawson.
10. The 2008 judges were Claire Armitstead, Daljit Nagra, Chris Rapley, Hannah Rothschild, Rosie Boycott.
11. 2009 was the first year as BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction. The judges announced the winner of the prize at an awards event at King's Place, London on 30 June. The monetary prize for 2009 was £20,000 for the winner, and each finalist receives £1000. The 2009 judges were Mark Lythgoe, Tim Marlow, Munira Mirza, Sarah Sands, Jacob Weisberg.
12. The 2010 judges were Evan Davis, Jan Dalley, Daniel Finkelstein, Roger Highfield, Stella Tillyard.
13. The 2011 judges were David Goodhart, Sam Leith, Ben Macintyre, Brenda Maddox, Amanda Vickery.
14. The 2012 judges were David Willetts, Patrick French, Paul Laity, Bronwen Maddox, Raymond Tallis. The 2012 monetary prize was £20,000 for the winner.
15. The 2013 judging panel was chaired by cosmologist and Astronomer Royal, Martin Rees, Baron Rees of Ludlow, accompanied by classical historian Mary Beard, director of Liberty Shami Chakrabarti, historian Peter Hennessy and writer and critic James McConnachie.
16. The 2014 judging panel was chaired by author and historian Claire Tomalin, accompanied by Alan Johnson MP, Financial Times Books Editor Lorien Kite, philosopher Ray Monk and historian Ruth Scurr.
17. The 2015 judging panel was chaired by Pulitzer prize-winning historian and journalist Anne Applebaum, together with editor of Intelligent Life Emma Duncan, editor of New Scientist Sumit Paul-Choudhury, Director of China Centre at Oxford University Professor Rana Mitter and former Controller of Film and Drama and Head of Film 4 Tessa Ross.
18. 2016 was the first year as Baillie Gifford Prize. The 2016 judging panel was chaired by former BBC Economics Editor Stephanie Flanders, together with Philip Ball, science writer and author; Jonathan Derbyshire, executive comment editor of the Financial Times; Dr Sophie Ratcliffe, scholar, writer and literary critic and Rohan Silva, co-founder of the social enterprise Second Home.
19. The 2017 judging panel was chaired by chaired by author and Chairman of ITV Sir Peter Bazalgette, together with Anjana Ahuja, science writer; Ian Bostridge, tenor and writer; Professor Sarah Churchwell, academic and writer and Razia Iqbal, journalist and broadcaster.
20. The 2018 judging panel was chaired by The Economist's culture correspondent Fiammetta Rocco, with Stephen Bush, journalist and political commentator; Susan Brigden, historian; Anne-Marie Imafidon, mathematician and campaigner; and Nigel Warburton, philosopher.
21. The 2019 judging panel was chaired by Times Literary Supplement editor Stig Abell, with Myriam François, TV producer and writer; Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, professor of English Literature; Frances Wilson, critic and biographer; Petina Gappah, writer and lawyer and Alexander Van Tulleken, doctor and TV presenter.
22. The 2020 judging panel consisted of Martha Kearney (BBC Radio presenter), Shahidha Bari (writer and radio presenter), Simon Ings (writer and editor), Leo Robson (writer), Max Strasser (editor) and Bee Wilson (journalist and writer).
23. The 2021 judging panel consisted of Andrew Holgate, Sara Collins, Helen Czerski, Kathryn Hughes, Johny Pitts and Dominic Sandbrook.
24. The 2022 judges were Caroline Sanderson (chair), Laura Spinney, Rachel Cooke, Clive Myrie, Samanth Subramanian and Georgina Godwin
25. The 2023 judges were Arifa Akbar, Andrew Haldane, Tanjil Rashid, Ruth Scurr, and Frederick Studemann (chair)
26. The 2024 judges were Heather Brooke, Alison Flood, Peter Hoskin, Tomiwa Owolade, Chitra Ramaswamy, and Isabel Hilton (chair)