Double nominations for Bloomsbury and Vintage on Baillie Gifford Prize longlist

Bloomsbury and Vintage have scooped double nominations on the 12-strong longlist for this year's Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction.

The shortlist for the award, which recently announced it was raising prize money to £50,000, will be announced on 22nd October, before the winner is crowned on 19th November in a ceremony at the Science Museum.

Today’s longlist includes a double nomination for Bloomsbury with The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company by William Dalrymple and The Lives of Lucian Freud: Youth by William Feaver.

Vintage also bagged two spots on the list with Maoism: A Global History by Julia Lovell and Ian Urbina’s The Outlaw Ocean, which illuminates the lawlessness and vastness of the high seas.

Other nominees include Casey Cep’s hybrid of true-crime, courtroom drama and Harper Lee biography Furious Hours (William Heinemann), and art critic Laura Cumming’s investigation of her mother’s disappearance On Chapel Sands (Chatto & Windus).

Homesick: Why I Live in a Shed by Catrina Davies (Riverrun) also makes the cut, along with journalist Amelia Gentleman’s The Windrush Betrayal: Exposing the Hostile Environment and The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell's 1984 by Dorian Lynskey (Picador).

There are also nods for Azadeh Moaveni’s account of women who decided to join ISIS, Guest House for Young Widows, (Scribe UK), Hallie Rubenhold’s myth-busting The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper (Doubleday) and imprisoned journalist Ahmet Altan’s memoir I Will Never See the World Again (Granta Books).

Chair of judges Stig Abell said: "It's been a summer of reading with unbridled pleasure, and I think we've ended up with a longlist of books that are - by turns - provocative, magisterial and beautiful pieces of work. Above all, they are companionable: stories to which you are happy to turn and return, some with contemporary resonances, others that are more timeless. Going from twelve down to six and then picking a winner is going to be a bit of a challenge."

Alongside the TLS editor, the panel includes TV producer and writer Dr Myriam Francois, English Literature professor Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, critic Frances Wilson, writer and lawyer Petina Gappah, and TV presenter Dr Alexander Van Tulleken.

Last year’s prize was scooped by Serhii Plokhy for Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy (Allen Lane).