The Baillie Gifford Prize (previously the Samuel Johnson Prize), which celebrates the best of non-fiction writing, announced their shortlist on October 5. The nominees’ works explored topics such as Islam, AIDS, immigration, technology, and Jewish history through narrative reporting and/or memoir.
This year’s shortlist includes the following six titles:
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- The Islamic Enlightenment: The Modern Struggle Between Faith and Reason by Christopher de Bellaigue
- How to Survive A Plague by David France (Featured in Richard Russo‘s year in reading)
- Border: A Journey to The Edge of Europe by Kapka Kassabova (Listed in the second half of our 2017 Great Book Preview)
- An Odyssey: A Father, A Son and An Epic by Daniel Mendelsohn (Read our 2012 interview with Mendelsohn)
- To Be A Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death by Mark O’Connell (An interview with O’Connell, who is one of our staff writers)
- Belonging: the Story of the Jews, 1492-1900 by Simon Schama
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