Book AwardsSamuel Johnson Prize for Non-fiction shortlist

Book awards by cover

Works (113)

TitlesOrder
C: Because Cowards Get Cancer Too... by John Diamond1999
Coleridge: Darker Reflections, 1804-1834 by Richard Holmes1999
Hitler: 1889-1936: Hubris by Ian Kershaw1999
Pilate: The Biography of an Invented Man by Ann Wroe1999
The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some are So Rich and Some So Poor by David S. Landes1999
Deliver Us from Evil: Peacekeepers, Warlords and a World of Endless Conflict by William Shawcross2000
Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters by Matt Ridley2000
Karl Marx by Francis Wheen2000
Playing the Moldovans at Tennis by Tony Hawks2000
Yeats's Ghosts: The Secret Life of W.B. Yeats by Brenda Maddox2000
Catherine the Great and Potemkin by Simon Sebag Montefiore2001
John Maynard Keynes, Vol. 3: Fighting for Freedom, 1937-1946 by Robert Skidelsky2001
Night of Stone by Catherine Merridale2001
Rimbaud: A Biography by Graham Robb2001
Trilobite! Eyewitness to Evolution by Richard Fortey2001
Churchill: A Biography by Roy Jenkins2002
The Invention of Clouds: How an Amateur Meteorologist Forged the Language of the Skies by Richard Hamblyn2002
The Snow Geese by William Fiennes2002
Unfinest Hour: Britain and the Destruction of Bosnia by Brendan Simms2002
The Voices of Morebath: Reformation and Rebellion in an English Village by Eamon Duffy2002
The Devil That Danced On the Water: A Daughter's Memoir by Aminatta Forna2003
Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation by Olivia Judson2003
Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia by Orlando Figes2003
Nelson: Love and Fame by Edgar Vincent2003
Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self by Claire Tomalin2003
Gulag: A History by Anne Applebaum2004
John Clare by Jonathan Bate2004
Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic by Tom Holland2004
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson2004
The Zanzibar Chest by Aidan Hartley2004
Istanbul: Memories and the City by Orhan Pamuk2005
The Italian Boy: A Tale of Murder and Body Snatching in 1830s London by Sarah Wise2005
Matisse the Master: A Life of Henri Matisse: The Conquest of Colour: 1909-1954 by Hilary Spurling2005
Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found by Suketu Mehta2005
Stuart: A Life Backwards by Alexander Masters2005
Bad Faith: A Forgotten History of Family, Fatherland and Vichy France by Carmen Callil2006
The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life by Tom Reiss2006
Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 by Tony Judt2006
The Sale of the Late King's Goods: Charles I and His Art Collection by Jerry Brotton2006
Untold Stories by Alan Bennett2006
Brainwash: The Secret History of Mind Control by Dominic Streatfeild2007
Gertrude Bell: Queen of the Desert, Shaper of Nations by Georgina Howell2007
Having It So Good: Britain in the Fifties by Peter Hennessy2007
Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo Van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance by Ian Buruma2007
The Verneys: A True Story of Love, War, and Madness in Seventeenth-Century England by Adrian Tinniswood2007
Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart by Tim Butcher2008
Crow Country by Mark Cocker2008
The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century by Alex Ross2008
The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia by Orlando Figes2008
The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul by Patrick French2008
The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Holmes2009
Bad Science: Quacks, Hacks, and Big Pharma Flacks by Ben Goldacre2009
Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World by Liaquat Ahamed2009
The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon by David Grann2009
Quantum: Einstein, Bohr, and the Great Debate about the Nature of Reality by Manjit Kumar2009
Alex's Adventures in Numberland by Alex Bellos2010
Blood Knots by Luke Jennings2010
Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human by Richard Wrangham2010
A Gambling Man: Charles II's Restoration Game by Jenny Uglow2010
Too Big to Fall: America's Failing Infrastructure and the Way Forward by Barry B. LePatner2010
Bismarck: A Life by Jonathan Steinberg2011
Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane by Andrew Graham-Dixon2011
Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World by Maya Jasanoff2011
The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves by Matt Ridley2011
Reprobates: The Cavaliers of the English Civil War by John Stubbs2011
Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo2012
The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker2012
The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot by Robert Macfarlane2012
The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain by Paul Preston2012
Strindberg: A Life by Sue Prideaux2012
Empires of the Dead: How One Man's Vision Led to the Creation of WWI's War Graves by David Crane2013
Margaret Thatcher: From Grantham to the Falklands by Charles Moore2013
Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan, 1839-42 by William Dalrymple2013
A Sting in the Tale: My Adventures with Bumblebees by Dave Goulson2013
Under Another Sky: Journeys in Roman Britain by Charlotte Higgins2013
Common People: In Pursuit of My Ancestors by Alison Light2014
The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World by Greg Grandin2014
The Iceberg by Marion Coutts2014
Roy Jenkins: A Well-Rounded Life by John Campbell2014
Village of Secrets: Defying the Nazis in Vichy France by Caroline Moorehead2014
The Four-Dimensional Human: Ways of Being in the Digital World by Laurence Scott2015
Landmarks by Robert Macfarlane2015
Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life by Jonathan Bate2015
This Divided Island: Stories from the Sri Lankan War by Samanth Subramanian2015
The Unraveling: High Hopes and Missed Opportunities in Iraq by Emma Sky2015
Negroland: A Memoir by Margo Jefferson2016
The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between by Hisham Matar2016
Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets by Svetlana Alexievich2016
Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe by Kapka Kassabova2017
The Islamic Enlightenment: The Struggle Between Faith and Reason, 1798 to Modern Times by Christopher De Bellaigue2017
An Odyssey: A Father, A Son, and an Epic by Daniel Mendelsohn2017
The Story of the Jews: Belonging, 1492–1900 by Simon Schama2017
To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death by Mark O'Connell2017
Amateur: A True Story About What Makes a Man by Thomas Page McBee2018
Hello World: Being Human in the Age of Algorithms by Hannah Fry2018
Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China's Last Golden Age by Stephen R. Platt2018
She Has Her Mother's Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity by Carl Zimmer2018
The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War by Ben Macintyre2018
The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper by Hallie Rubenhold — not in English Common Knowledge2019
Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee by Casey Cep2019
The Lives of Lucian Freud: The Restless Years, 1922-1968 by William Feaver2019
Maoism: A Global History by Julia Lovell2019
On Chapel Sands: My mother and other missing persons by Laura Cumming2019
Black Spartacus: The Epic Life of Toussaint Louverture by Sudhir Hazareesingh2020
The Haunting of Alma Fielding: A True Ghost Story by Kate Summerscale2020
The Idea of the Brain: The Past and Future of Neuroscience by Matthew Cobb2020
Our Bodies, Their Battlefields: War Through the Lives of Women by Christina Lamb2020
Stranger in the Shogun's City: A Japanese Woman and Her World by Amy Stanley2020
Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945–1955 by Harald Jähner2021
Fall: The Mystery of Robert Maxwell by John Preston2021
Free: Coming of Age at the End of History by Lea Ypi2021
Islands of Abandonment: Nature Rebounding in the Post-Human Landscape by Cal Flyn2021
Things I Have Withheld by Kei Miller2021