Ancient History Wins the £50,000 Baillie Giffond Prize for the First Time

Edmund Richardson has won the 2026 Baillie Gifford prize for nonfiction, and the £50,000 that comes with it, for Alexander: God, King, Man — becoming the first writer to take the award with a book of ancient history.

The ceremony took place in London on Wednesday evening. Richardson beat a six-strong shortlist that included former winner Patrick Radden Keefe's London Falling. It is the first book of ancient history to win the prize since it was founded in 1999.

Why did the judges pick it?

The chair of judges, broadcaster Kirsty Lang, called the book "blockbuster history" with "page-turning narrative pull". She described it as "a cracking cinematic story about the ancient world involving a masterful assembly of research materials alongside exceptional literary craft".

Richardson, she added, "combines the use of new technology and recent archaeological discoveries to tell the story of an extraordinary leader who conquered an empire stretching from ancient Greece to the Indian subcontinent".

What does this change for nonfiction publishing? A prize long dominated by contemporary history, reportage and memoir has now signalled that ancient subjects can win the biggest money in the genre — with a book that reads like a thriller rather than a seminar.

How the book was built

Alexander: God, King, Man traces its subject's life from 336BC, when Alexander took charge of a near-bankrupt kingdom and a barely controllable army at the age of 20, through his conquest of the Persian empire, to his death in Babylon at 32.

The research behind it spans more than a decade across four continents. Richardson translated sources from 12 ancient languages himself. He also folds in recent archaeological finds, including newly decoded records kept by Babylonian astronomers of Alexander's time — primary material that simply wasn't available to earlier biographers.

Who is Edmund Richardson?

The Baillie Gifford is the first major prize for Richardson, a professor of classics at Durham University. His previous books include Alexandria: The Quest for the Lost City (2021) and Classical Victorians: Scholars, Scoundrels and Generals in Pursuit of Antiquity (2013).

The shortlist he beat

The winner was chosen from a shortlist of six:

• Patrick Radden Keefe — London Falling, an investigation into the death of Zac Brettler, a British teenager who fell from a luxury London apartment after posing as the son of a wealthy Russian oligarch
• Andrea Wulf — The Traveller
• Matthew Sweet — The Great Dictator
• Nicholas Boggs — Baldwin: A Love Story
• Anand Gopal — Days of Love and Rage

Kirsty Lang was joined on the judging panel by novelist Elif Shafak, Waterstones head of books Bea Carvalho, writer and cultural historian Tiffany Jenkins, Spectator literary editor Sam Leith, and editor and reporter Ravi Mattu.

The winner was selected from more than 350 eligible titles published between 1 November 2025 and 31 October 2026, narrowed to a longlist of 13 in September.

A bumper year for the classical world

Richardson's win caps an unusually strong run for antiquity in mainstream culture. Christopher Nolan's film adaptation of The Odyssey sent sales of Homer's epic soaring. Last month, the Canadian poet and classicist Anne Carson — whose work is steeped in ancient Greek literature — was awarded the Nobel prize.

The pattern suggests the ancient world is having a commercial moment, not just a scholarly one, and publishers will notice.

The prize's own history

The award was founded in 1999 as the Samuel Johnson prize and has been sponsored by investment management firm Baillie Gifford since 2016. Last year it went to the Australian writer Helen Garner for her collected diaries, How to End a Story. Past winners include Antony Beevor, Jonathan Coe, Serhii Plokhy, Hallie Rubenhold and Katherine Rundell.

With a first-time major prizewinner, a first for ancient history and a classics boom running in the background, the 2026 result may well push readers — and commissioning editors — back toward the ancient world.