6 min readUpdated: Sep 20, 2026 08:03 PM IST
The Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction is one of the most watched awards, and this year’s longlist, replete with ancient battlefields, wartime Parisian hotels, and the shadowy corridors of Cold War espionage, does not disappoint.
From a formidable list of 13 works of non-fiction penned by some of the brightest minds of our age, The Indian Express spotlights five must-read books:
London Falling — Patrick Radden Keefe (Picador)
London Falling centres on one of the most intriguing true-crime stories involving 19-year-old Zac Brettler, who fell to his death from a luxury London penthouse balcony overlooking the Thames in November 2019. After his death, it emerged that he had been leading a double life, posing as the son of a Russian oligarch and rubbing shoulders with gangsters such as Verinder Sharma, known as Indian Dave. Keefe follows Zac’s parents as they try to understand what brought their son to that balcony and how a teenager’s elaborate fantasy life drew him into London’s underworld. Keefe, a staff writer at The New Yorker, previously won the prize in 2021 for Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty. He returns to the longlist with this stranger-than-fiction story.
Ukrainian Lessons — Charlotte Higgins (Jonathan Cape)
Amid the Russia-Ukraine conflict, the Guardian’s chief culture writer Charlotte Higgins travelled to Ukraine in 2022 to document the role of art in wartime. She did not go there as a war reporter but because she believed Ukrainian artists would respond to the conflict in ways journalists, politicians and official reports could not. She found artists expressing “things that ordinary discourse cannot reach”, delving into the visceral emotions of living through war. Travelling across Ukraine, Higgins documents poets, painters and musicians making art as an act of survival. She argues that their work will shape how the war is remembered, much as the poetry of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen shaped Britain’s memory of the First World War. Each chapter opens with a Ukrainian language lesson, reflecting Higgins’s own journey of learning the language.
3. The Nord Stream Conspiracy — Bojan Pancevski (Hutchinson Heinemann)
In The Nord Stream Conspiracy, Pancevski, Chief European Political Correspondent for The Wall Street Journal and Pulitzer Prize finalist for International Reporting in 2025, tackles one of the most enduring mysteries of the modern era: who blew up the $20 billion pipeline system that carried Russian gas to Europe under the Baltic Sea? When Pancevski first saw the now-iconic images of the colossal geysers erupting from the sea in September 2022, he “realised they heralded a story like no other.” Nord Stream, he writes, was “a steel-and-concrete embodiment” of Germany’s belief that commercial entanglement with Russia would defuse tensions, and of Putin’s belief that energy dependence would give him leverage over Europe. Drawing on exclusive access to both the saboteurs and the German investigators hunting them, Pancevski offers a real-life geopolitical thriller.
Days of Love and Rage — Anand Gopal (Pluto Press)
Gopal, a writer for The New Yorker and author of the acclaimed No Good Men Among the Living, has documented the human costs of war. His first book, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, offered a ground-level view of the Afghanistan War through the eyes of ordinary Afghans. In Days of Love and Rage, he turns his gaze to Syria, telling the story of the 2011 revolution in the northern city of Manbij, an experiment in democracy that, for 18 months, overthrew a brutal dictatorship and offered a glimpse of a different future. Gopal immerses readers in the lives of the men and women who led this struggle: a pair of best friends torn apart by political polarisation, a mother who stands up to male dominance, and a worker who risks everything for the dream of equality. At 592 pages, it is an ambitious work that rewards patience with profound insight.
Redwood — Ben Macintyre (Viking)
In Redwood, Macintyre, historian and writer at large for The Times of London, tells the story of a Cold War double agent whose intelligence reached the highest levels of British and American governments. The book is set in 1981, when Tehran is in turmoil after the Iranian Revolution. The Soviets are planning to overthrow the Ayatollah’s fledgling Islamist regime, but if they do, America might use nuclear weapons. Redwood, the double agent, cracked open the KGB, revealed the Kremlin’s secret plot, and prevented Armageddon. More than a thriller, the book is also a moving story of friendship between spies on opposite sides of the global conflict; of marriage, loyalty, betrayal, and sexual dysfunction; and of how decisions made in secret can have huge, long-term ramifications that still shape our world today.
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The 2026 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction Longlist
📌 Baldwin: A Love Story — Nicholas Boggs (Bloomsbury Circus)
📌 Stay Alive: Berlin, 1939–1945 — Ian Buruma (Atlantic Non-Fiction)
📌 Murder in Paris ’68: A True Story of Death and Glamour — Edward Chisholm (Monoray)
📌 Days of Love and Rage: A Story of Revolution — Anand Gopal (Pluto Press)
📌 Ukrainian Lessons: Art in a Time of War — Charlotte Higgins (Jonathan Cape)
📌London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family’s Search for Truth — Patrick Radden Keefe (Picador)
📌Redwood: The Untold Story of the Cold War’s Most Extraordinary Spy — Ben Macintyre (Viking)
📌 The Nord Stream Conspiracy: The Inside Story of the Explosions That Shook the World — Bojan Pancevski (Hutchinson Heinemann)
📌Alexander: God, King, Man — Edmund Richardson (Bloomsbury Publishing)
📌 Hotel Exile: Paris in the Shadow of War — Jane Rogoyska (Allen Lane)
📌Never Say War: Life Inside Russia — Åsne Seierstad, translated by Siân Mackie (Virago)
📌 The Great Dictator: A Life of Barbara Cartland — Matthew Sweet (Hodder & Stoughton)
📌The Traveller: The Revolutionary Life of George Forster and His Search for Humanity — Andrea Wulf (Allen Lane)
