November 19, 2024, 5:15pm

Out of an impressive shortlist, Richard Flanagan’s Question 7 has won 2024’s Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction. Flanagan’s wide-ranging memoir and history weaves together H.G. Wells and Rebecca West’s affair, pre-war nuclear physics, his father’s imprisonment near Hiroshima when the American atom bomb falls, and Flanagan’s own life-or-death experience on a raging river, and more. You can read an excerpt of the book, in which Flanagan visits the spot where his father was imprisoned in a Japanese internment camp, here.

Isabel Hilton, who chaired this year’s panel of judges, says of the winner:

Question 7 is an astonishingly accomplished meditation on memory, history, trauma, love and death—and an intricately woven exploration of the chains of consequence that frame a life.

In a year rich in remarkable books, Richard Flanagan’s Question 7 spoke to the judges for its outstanding literary qualities and its profound humanity. This compelling memoir ranges from intimate human relations to an unflinching examination of the horrors of the 20th century, reflecting on unanswerable questions that we must keep asking.

Flanagan will receive £50,000; each shortlisted author will be awarded £5,000. Flanagan is now the first writer to win both the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction and the Booker Prize for Fiction, which he won for The Narrow Road to the Deep North.

This year’s winner was selected by Isabel Hilton, journalist, broadcaster, and founder of China Dialogue; Heather Brooke, author and investigative journalist; Alison Flood, comment and culture editor for New Scientist; Peter Hoskin, culture editor of Prospect; Tomiwa Owolade, writer and critic; and Chitra Ramaswamy, author, restaurant critic, and journalist.

You can read more about Flanagan and the prize at the Baillie Gifford Prize’s site.