Salman Rushdie’s memoir about surviving being stabbed is among the books longlisted for the 2024 Baillie Gifford prize for nonfiction.
Rushdie’s book, titled Knife, recounts the August 2022 attack, which happened on stage at the Chautauqua Institution in New York state, as well as the author’s recovery.
Alongside Rushdie on this year’s longlist is fellow Booker winner Richard Flanagan, with his most recent book, Question 7. No author to date has won both the Booker and Baillie Gifford prizes.
Judgement at Tokyo by Gary J Bass (Picador)
Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here by Jonathan Blitzer (Picador)
The Story of a Heart by Rachel Clarke (Abacus)
Melting Point by Rachel Cockerell (Wildfire)
Question 7 by Richard Flanagan (Chatto)
Nuclear War by Annie Jacobsen (Torva)
A Man of Two Faces by Viet Thanh Nguyen (Corsair)
Wild Thing by Sue Prideaux (Faber)
Revolusi by David Van Reybrouck, translated by David Colmer and David McKay (Bodley Head)
Knife by Salman Rushdie (Cape)
What the Wild Sea Can Be by Helen Scales (Grove)
The Rebel's Clinic by Adam Shatz (Apollo)
The winner of the prize, which recognises the best new nonfiction, will receive £50,000. Other shortlisted authors will receive £5,000 each.
Displacement, colonialism, nuclear war and the natural environment are among the themes explored in the books on this year’s 12-strong longlist.
The titles “shed new and brilliant light on our contemporary world through explorations of history, of memory, of science and nature,” said judging chair, the journalist Isabel Hilton. “Collectively, this wonderful reflection of creativity, critical thinking and great writing left us in no doubt that the nonfiction world is overflowing with energy and talent.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen, who won the Pulitzer prize for fiction in 2016, was longlisted for A Man of Two Faces, in which he unfolds his family’s story to examine refugeehood and identity among the Vietnamese diaspora.
The longlist features one debut book, Melting Point by Rachel Cockerell. She looks at the role of her great-grandfather David Jochelmann in the Galveston movement, in which 10,000 Jews fled to Texas before the first world war.
Also exploring displacement is Jonathan Blitzer’s Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here, which follows the lives of migrants arriving at the US southern border and the policies affecting them.
The list features two authors previously recognised by the prize. Rachel Clarke, who was longlisted in 2020, is this year selected for The Story of a Heart, which blends the history of heart transplant surgery with the stories of two children connected by a transplant. Sue Prideaux, shortlisted in 2012, has this time been chosen for Wild Thing, about the life of the French artist Paul Gauguin.
Joining Hilton on this year’s judging panel are author and journalist Heather Brooke, New Scientist comment and culture editor Alison Flood, Prospect culture editor Peter Hoskin, writer and critic Tomiwa Owolade, and author and restaurant critic Chitra Ramaswamy.
Completing the 2024 longlist is Judgement at Tokyo by Gary J Bass, Nuclear War by Annie Jacobsen, Revolusi by David Van Reybrouck, translated by David Colmer and David McKay; What the Wild Sea Can Be by Helen Scales and The Rebel’s Clinic by Adam Shatz.
A shortlist of six titles will be announced on 10 October at Cheltenham literature festival, and the winner will be announced 19 November. The 2024 prize was open to books published between 1 November 2023 and 31 October 2024 written by authors of any nationality. A total of 349 books were considered this year.
Investment management company Baillie Gifford has sponsored the prize since 2016. Over the past year, the firm has been criticised over its links to Israel and fossil fuel companies by campaign group Fossil Free Books, leading to a number of authors cancelling appearances at literary festivals that were sponsored by the company.
By the beginning of June this year, all nine of the partnerships between the company and literary festivals had been cancelled, though the Baillie Gifford prize sponsorship remained in place. At the time, a spokesperson for the Baillie Gifford prize said that the prize had always found the company “to be collaborative, generous and transparent about their investments”.
Baillie Gifford “are contracted to sponsor the prize until the end of 2025 and we are fully committed to that relationship”, they added. Prize organisers told the Guardian that two authors asked to withdraw their book from consideration for this year’s prize, with one explicitly stating Baillie Gifford’s sponsorship as the reason.
Previous winners of the award include Antony Beevor, Jonathan Coe and Hallie Rubenhold. Last year, John Vaillant won the prize for Fire Weather, which tells the story of the wildfires that struck Fort McMurray in Alberta, Canada in 2016.
