Richard Flanagan wins the Baillie Gifford Prize, with a condition attached

Richard Flanagan has won the 2024 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction for Question 7, published by Chatto & Windus. The award was announced on 19 November 2024 in London. Flanagan becomes the first writer to win both this prize and the Booker Prize, which he won in 2014 for The Narrow Road to the Deep North.

Question 7 combines memoir and history, moving between the author's family past and wider twentieth-century events. The panel was chaired by Isabel Hilton. The shortlist also included Revolusi by David Van Reybrouck, Wild Thing by Sue Prideaux, A Man of Two Faces by Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nuclear War by Annie Jacobsen and The Story of a Heart by Rachel Clarke.

In a pre-recorded acceptance speech, Flanagan said he would delay taking the £50,000 prize money until Baillie Gifford, the investment firm that sponsors the award, announced a plan to reduce its investment in fossil fuels. Earlier in the year the sponsor had been the target of protests by the Fossil Free Books campaign over its investments.

Sponsorship now pays for much of the UK's literary prize and festival economy, and this was the most visible moment yet in the argument over where that money comes from. Authors weighing a shortlisting or an invitation increasingly face the same question, and there is no settled answer.

Sources: Baillie Gifford Prize: 2024; Literary Hub: Richard Flanagan wins the Baillie Gifford Prize.