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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favorite tales on this weekly publication.
A minute-by-minute account of the prelude to nuclear Armageddon; the journey of the guts of a nine-year-old woman from automobile crash to transplant; and an ignored historical past of the start of one of many world’s most populous democracies are among the many books shortlisted for this 12 months’s Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction.
The six titles on the shortlist “provide profound perception into a number of the most urgent problems with our time”, mentioned Isabel Hilton, the chair of judges, a journalist and founding father of China Dialogue.
Annie Jacobsen’s Nuclear Warfare: A State of affairs was described by judges as “deeply researched and terrifying” whereas The Story of a Coronary heart by Rachel Clarke, an NHS palliative care physician, was discovered to be “a profoundly transferring” story of life and loss of life.
Two of the titles on the shortlist, which was introduced on Thursday evening on the Cheltenham Literary Competition, are by authors who’ve additionally been celebrated for his or her fiction: Query 7 by Richard Flanagan and A Man of Two Faces by Vietnamese-American Viet Thanh Nguyen.
Flanagan received the 2014 Booker Prize for his novel The Slender Highway to the Deep North — elevating the prospect that with Query 7, a “love tune to his island residence” of Tasmania, he is perhaps the primary author to scoop the “double” of the UK’s premier fiction and non-fiction prizes.
Nguyen’s e-book, which charts his seek for belonging, interrogating the inherent tensions inside his Vietnamese-American id and the imperfection of reminiscence, borrows its title from the opening line of his 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction successful novel The Sympathizer.
The checklist consists of one work in translation, Revolusi: Indonesia and the Delivery of the Trendy World by the Belgian David Van Reybrouck (translated by David Colmer and David McKay), which tells the story of the revolt in opposition to Dutch rule that set the template for a wave of decolonisation.
Acclaimed biographer Sue Prideaux, writer of Wild Factor: A Lifetime of Paul Gauguin, makes it to the shortlist for the second time, following her 2012 biography Strindberg: A Life. The judges mentioned that her newest e-book “forged recent gentle on this most unbelievable of inventive lives”.
Salman Rushdie, who acquired the 1981 Booker, was additionally a possible contender for the fiction/non-fiction prize double after Knife, his account of the try on his life in August 2022, was longlisted however didn’t make it into the ultimate six.
Baillie Gifford has maintained its sponsorship of the non-fiction prize regardless of cancelling its literary competition sponsorships earlier this 12 months after activist strain led the Hay Competition and Edinburgh Worldwide E book Competition to chop ties with the Scottish asset supervisor.
The judging panel — which alongside Hilton, included investigative journalist Heather Brooke; remark and tradition editor for New Scientist, Alison Flood; tradition editor of Prospect journal, Peter Hoskin; the author and critic, Tomiwa Owolade; and writer and restaurant critic Chitra Ramaswamy — made their choice from 349 books printed between November 1 2023 and October 31 2024.
The winner will probably be introduced on 19 November.
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