Music, history and courageous journalism: Baillie Gifford prize shortlist announced

Judges praise the final six ‘exquisite and ambitious’ works in contention for the £50,000 award for nonfiction

Books tackling climate change, China, the NHS, European revolutions, ballet and music feature on the shortlist for this year’s Baillie Gifford prize for nonfiction.

The six-long list includes “exquisite, quite ambitious works of writing about art and music and history” as well as “very courageous investigative journalism”, said judging chair and Financial Times literary editor Frederick Studemann. He announced the list on Sunday live from an event at Cheltenham Literature Festival.

Continue reading...

from The Guardian https://ift.tt/GsNLKI2

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Brahms’ Last Concert review – OAE and Emelyanychev take audience back to 1897

Queen Elizabeth Hall, London This recreation of the final concert that the composer attended – only weeks before his death aged 63 – featured his fourth symphony, Dvorak’s Cello Concerto and Haydn’s symphony no 73. Every period-instrument outfit has its shtick – its own version of what “historically informed performance ” might mean. The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment plays music from an increasingly generous historical tranche ( Stravinsky beckons next season ) but always on instruments dating from the same period as the works being performed. Except when they don’t. This performance marking the OAE’s 40th anniversary was not about imagining what certain compositions might have sounded like to their first audiences. Instead, it reproduced the exact programme of a concert held in Vienna on 7 March 1897. The 19th-century concert was the latest instalment in a series run by the eminent conductor Hans Richter , which turned out to be the final concert ever attended by Johannes Brah...
Read more

China Nobel prize winner tarred as one of ‘three new evils’ amid rise in nationalist fervour

Mo Yan is widely celebrated in China but now faces a lawsuit accusing him of smearing the Communist party amid an increasingly febrile atmosphere online At first glance, a Nobel prize winning author, a bottle of green tea and Beijing’s Tsinghua University have little in common. But in recent weeks they have been dubbed by China’s nationalist netizens as the “three new evils” in the fight to defend the country’s valour in cyberspace. Last month a patriotic blogger called Wu Wanzheng filed a lawsuit against China’s only Nobel prize-winning author, Mo Yan, accusing him of smearing the Communist army and glorifying Japanese soldiers in his fictional works set during the Japanese invasion of China. Continue reading... from The Guardian https://ift.tt/y0Zl4ov
Read more