Sam Leith Sam Leith

Read what The Spectator thought of the winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize for non-fiction

Last night saw the award of this year’s £30,000 Baillie Gifford Prize – the country’s most respected prize for non-fiction – to David France’s How To Survive A Plague (Picador).

You can read Peter Tatchell’s Spectator review of this account of the ‘plague years’ of the Aids crisis, and the extraordinary work that activists did to change the medical establishment’s treatment of the disease, here.

Mr France’s book headed a strong shortlist. The Spectator’s reviews are all linked below.
The Islamic Enlightenment: The Modern Struggle Between Faith and Reason, Christopher de Bellaigue (The Bodley Head)
Border: A Journey to The Edge of Europe, Kapka Kassabova (Granta Books)
An Odyssey: A Father, A Son and An Epic, Daniel Mendelsohn (William Collins)
To Be A Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death, Mark O’Connell (Granta Books)
Belonging: the Story of the Jews, 1492-1900, Simon Schama (The Bodley Head)

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