2026 Longlist for The Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction

London Falling

The Nord Stream Conspiracy

The explosive inside story of the most daring act of sabotage in modern history—the bombing of the $20 billion Nord Stream Pipeline. Written by the award-winning Chief European Political Correspondent of the Wall Street Journal. 'Totally fascinating... As compelling as a spy thriller'Simon Sebag Montefiore 'Jaw-dropping... a pearl of a story'Rory Carroll 'All the elements of a fictional thriller... I can already see the blockbuster movie'Rory Clements In September 2022, Scandinavian seismologists detected what seemed to be a huge undersea earthquake or volcanic eruption. These signals were caused by several devastating explosions that destroyed Nord Stream, the $20 billion pipeline carrying cheap Russian gas to Europe under the Baltic Sea. The mysterious blasts shifted global geopolitics, disrupted European economies and triggered a manhunt that strained relations within the...

Redwood

From the multi-million-selling historian, the remarkable, unknown Cold War story of how one spy saved the world from nuclear war. The year is 1981. Tehran is in violent turmoil in the wake of the Iranian Revolution. The Soviets are planning to overthrow the Ayatollah's fledgling Islamist regime. If they do so, one response from America — unknown to the public — would be to use nuclear weapons. This is the story of how at the height of the Cold War, one mysterious double agent, known to MI6 as Redwood, revealed the Kremlin's secret plot and prevented Armageddon. This unsung, hitherto unknown hero of the Cold War, a six-foot-four Russian intelligence officer, had a problem, a sexual secret, one that if revealed, would turn his life upside-down. So he...

Baldwin: A Love Story

WINNER OF THE NBCC JOHN LEONARD PRIZE WINNER OF THE PEN/ JACQUELINE BOGRAD WELD AWARD FOR BIOGRAPHY A TIME TOP 10 BOOK OF 2025 AN ATLANTIC TOP 10 BOOK OF 2025 A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2025 AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER AN AMAZON BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR Drawing on new archival material, original research, and interviews, this spellbinding book is the first major biography of James Baldwin in three decades, revealing how profoundly his personal relationships shaped his life and work. Baldwin: A Love Story, the first major biography of James Baldwin in three decades, reveals how profoundly the writer's personal relationships shaped his life and work. Drawing on newly uncovered archival material and original research and interviews, this spellbinding book tells the...

Days of Love and Rage

In 2011, in a city in northern Syria, the people began a movement that aimed to remake their country after decades of brutal dictatorship. For the next eighteen months, citizens of Manbij carried out one of the most remarkable experiments in democracy in modern times. Days of Love and Rage tells the story of the Syrian revolution, from its early days through the overthrow of the Assad regime, in microcosm. Anand Gopal immerses us in the world of a single city through the intimate narratives of the men and women who led the struggle. Through mesmerising and moving stories, we experience the highs of camaraderie and the lows of betrayal: a pair of best friends torn apart by political polarisation, a mother who stands up to male dominance,...

The Traveller

An inspiring biography of the remarkable naturalist, explorer and revolutionary, by the bestselling author of The Invention of Nature. George Forster was a man out of time—he journeyed to the far reaches of the known world and challenged the worldviews of eighteenth-century Europe with radical ideas about equality and freedom. Celebrated during his lifetime, he knew Goethe, Benjamin Franklin, Mary Wollstonecraft and Alexander von Humboldt, but has since been largely forgotten by history. The Traveller seeks to restore Forster as one of the great visionaries of his era. At the age of seventeen, he joined Captain Cook's second voyage—an exploration of vast contrasts from the icy world of Antarctica to the tropical islands of the South Pacific. A brilliant mind driven by boundless curiosity, he studied the diverse...

The Great Dictator

Penniless virgins. Reckless dukes. Flappers. Airmen. Suffragettes. Barbara Cartland made them fall in love. She wrote 723 books without touching a typewriter: instead, she reclined on her sofa with a Pekinese on her lap—romantic fiction billowed out of her. This dazzling biography reveals the woman behind the powder and mascara—a clever, socially precarious writer navigating a twentieth-century world of war-damaged men, class conflict, and sexual peril. After 49 proposals, she chose the wrong one. What followed was a life stranger than any of her novels. From country house weekends to Fleet Street offices, from Mayfair bedrooms to the divorce court, Matthew Sweet traces Cartland's extraordinary journey through a century of upheaval. Here are terrorist plots, psychic seances, suppressed scandals, plagiarism battles in the cutthroat world of romance publishing—and...

Never Say War

A totally unprecedented, behind the scenes portrait of Putin's Russia at war. Astonishing. A major work — Antony Beevor Putin's Russia silences its citizens, targets foreign journalists and invaded a neighbouring country — while declaring it illegal to say the country is at war. This is what we know from the outside: but what does it feel like on the inside? The way into this question, for bestselling author and journalist Åsne Seierstad, was young Russian soldier Andrey Medvedev, who defected from the infamous Wagner Group and sought asylum in Norway in January 2023. He was three years old when Putin rose to power and his life story mirrors the transformation of his country. As Åsne dug deeper into his family and connections, more and more of Russian...

Alexander

'A thrilling story, wonderfully told by one of the great historians' KEN FOLLETT 'Dazzling... This is biography of great brilliance and rare resonance' WILLIAM DALRYMPLE 'A pulsating, vivid life of a true historical titan' DAN JONES 'A splendid book, lively, erudite... where myth and heroism meet' RORY STEWART A stunningly written new biography of Alexander the Great, based on a series of important new discoveries and the author’s own translations of source material from twelve ancient languages. In 336 BCE, at the age of twenty, Alexander, a wide-eyed boy from the hills of Macedon, inherited a tumbledown kingdom, a pile of debts and an army which answered to nobody. Desperate to hold on to power, he led the army east, into the heart of the vast Persian Empire,...

Murder In Paris '68

From the author of the word-of-mouth breakout hit, A Waiter In Paris, comes an intimate and authentically told true story from the Parisian demi-monde of the 1960s, when the high-life and the low-life went hand in hand. It was a time when the French New Wave of cinema was taking the world by storm, a time of glamour, sports cars, casinos, and nightclubs - and at the heart of it all, the man of the moment, the enigmatic film star Alain Delon, dubbed 'the most beautiful man in the world'. With a shady past and a taste for bad company and high-living, Delon lived on the edge. But when a dead body turns up in the outskirts of Paris that turns out to be Stevan Markovic, Delon's friend,...

Stay Alive

In 1939, when Ian Buruma's epic opens, Berlin has been under Nazi rule for six years, and its 4.3 million people have made their accommodations to the regime, more or less. When war broke out with Poland in September, what was most striking at first was how little changed. Unless you were Jewish. Then life, already hard, was soon to get unfathomably worse. By 1943, with the German defeat at Stalingrad, ordinary life in Berlin would acquire an increasingly desperate cast. The last three years of the war in Berlin are truly a descent into hell, with a deranged regime in desperate free fall, an increasingly relentless pounding from Allied bombers, and the mounting dread of the approaching Soviet army. The common greeting of Berliners was now not...