Helen Garner's diaries win the Baillie Gifford Prize
Helen Garner's How to End a Story: Collected Diaries is the first diary to win the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction.
The Australian writer Helen Garner has won the 2025 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction for How to End a Story: Collected Diaries, published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson. The £50,000 award was announced on 4 November 2025 in London. It is the first time a diary has won in the prize's history.
The book gathers twenty years of Garner's diaries, from 1978 to 1998, first published in Australia as three separate volumes. The chair of judges, Robbie Millen, said the panel's decision was unanimous. More than 350 books were considered.
The other shortlisted titles were Electric Spark by Frances Wilson, Lone Wolf by Adam Weymouth, Captives and Companions by Justin Marozzi, The Boundless Deep by Richard Holmes and The Revolutionists by Jason Burke. Each shortlisted author receives £5,000.
This is the second year running that the prize has gone to an Australian author. The result is also a small encouragement for forms that sit at the edge of what publishers call narrative non-fiction. Diaries, letters and journals are usually treated as secondary material for biographers. Here a writer's own record of her working life was judged on equal terms with histories and biographies built from years of research.
Sources: Baillie Gifford Prize: 2025; LoveReading: Baillie Gifford Prize announces 2025 winner.