Personal stories are a strong focus in this year’s Baillie Gifford prize for nonfiction longlist, with Yiyun Li’s memoir about the loss of her two teenage sons by suicide and Barbara Demick’s account of her role reuniting a pair of twins separated in China among those recognised.
Biographies and narrative histories which explore a recent period from a personal perspective also dominate the longlist of 12 titles – nine of which were written by journalists, including the Guardian writer Jason Burke and the BBC war correspondent Lyse Doucet. Eight of the authors are British.
