Never mind the Booker – novels are no match for the messiness of real life
The Baillie Gifford Prize shortlist shows we’re in a golden age for non-fiction, says Jake Kerridge
The Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-fiction, the shortlist for which has just been announced, is never treated to the reams of coverage enjoyed by the Booker Prize. This may explain why its judging panels tend to be free of the egotists and celebrities who so often serve as Booker judges and have made so many eccentric decisions.
The Baillie Gifford, originally known as the Samuel Johnson Prize, has consistently asserted its high seriousness. The inaugural award 20 years ago went to Antony Beevor’s
Stalingrad and the judges have generally chosen well in the years since, with winners ranging from biographies of Shakespeare, Pushkin and Berlioz to Helen Macdonald’s deeply personal memoir of grief and falconry, H is for
Hawk. Last year’s winner was Serhii Plokii’s Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy, a timely corrective to the historical fudges and political naïveté of the HBO miniseries, yet just as gripping and immersive.
The same qualities of being both serious and seriously readable are shared by the six books on this year’s shortlist, which features a number of biographies that focus on unconventional subjects or under-explored areas of the lives of the famous. It is no surprise that there is a place for On Chapel
Sands, Laura Cumming’s book about the events that led to her mother being kidnapped from a Lincolnshire beach, aged three, in 1929; it has deservedly received universal critical acclaim. It’s a gift of a story to have in your family history, but Cumming shows remarkable artistry in using the event as the basis for painting
a picture of life in a small community.
Two more books on the shortlist tackle the subject of ordinary women involved in extraordinary events. Hallie Rubenhold’s The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper
restores some dignity to the women who have been reduced to bit parts in a whodunit for the past 130 years, while Guest House for Young Widows by Azadeh Moaveni profiles Shamima Begum and other women who have left their lives in the West to join Isil. William Feaver’s The Lives of Lucian
Freud: Youth and Casey Cep’s Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud and the Last Trial of Harper Lee are more conventional biographies in that the subjects are household names, but they are superb, sparklingly intelligent books. How one judges these five works against Julia Lovell’s ambitious
Maoism: A Global History cannot be easily answered, but the diversity of the shortlist certainly spotlights the wide range of quality non-fiction being published at the moment.
Happily, there are several other prizes testifying to the non-fiction riches currently available. The Orwell Prize celebrates political writing, and the Duff Cooper and Wolfson prizes reward works of history. The James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography celebrates its 100th birthday this year: this award, which ought to be as famous as the Booker, has provided an essential boost for the dogged practitioners of biography, often the most back-breaking and poorly rewarded branch of literature. Past winners range from Martin Amis’s surprisingly poignant memoir
Experience to Hermione Lee’s forensic but emotionally smart study of the novelist Penelope Fitzgerald.
Non-fiction prizes rarely receive as much attention as prizes for fiction, perhaps because non-fiction carries an unfair association with reading for improvement rather than for pleasure, whereas fiction can boast of being life with the boring bits cut out. The best nonfiction, though, shows that the formulaic simplifications of the average novel are no match for the glorious messiness of reality.
In a year in which the most feted novel is Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments, a clever but hardly inspired retread of her classic The
Handmaid’s Tale, perhaps we are better off looking to non-fiction to manage the twin tasks of entertaining us and teaching us about the world. Forget the Booker histrionics and listen to what the Baillie Gifford is telling us: we’re living in a golden age for non-fiction.
The winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize will be announced on November 19