Books on AI and billionaires dominate FT and Schroders Business Book of the Year Award longlist

Books on AI, billionaires and natural resources have made the longlist for this year’s £30,000 Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year Award.

The longlist announcement comes one week after the Financial Times and global investment management firm Schroders agreed a three-year partnership for the award. Now in it’s 19th year, the prize highlights books exploring business and economic issues, and is awarded to the book that provides "the most compelling and enjoyable insight into today’s business issues".

In total 15 books were picked by FT journalists from over 500 entries for the longlist, which also covers issues such as cryptocurrencies, climate change and the future of money.

Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson are featured on this year’s longlist, for their book Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity (Basic Books). Bethany Allen is also on the list, for Beijing Rules: China’s Quest for Global Influence (John Murray).

Artificial intelligence is an issue covered by the 2023 longlist, which features Mustafa Suleyman and Michael Bhaskar’s The Coming Wave: AI, Power and the Twenty-First Century’s Greatest Dilemma (The Bodley Head). Data and privacy are also topics on this year’s list, written about by Kashmir Hill in Your Face Belongs to Us: The Secretive Startup Dismantling Your Privacy (Simon & Schuster).

Meanwhile, Brian Merchant is on the longlist for Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech (Little, Brown & Company), and Rachel O’Dwyer is in the running with Tokens: The Future of Money in the Age of the Platform (Verso Books). 

The Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year Award longlist in full

• Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity by Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson (Basic Books)
• Beijing Rules: China’s Quest for Global Influence by Bethany Allen (John Murray)
• Billionaires’ Row: Tycoons, High Rollers, and the Epic Race to Build the World’s Most Exclusive Skyscrapers by Katherine Clarke (Currency)
• Material World: A Substantial Story of Our Past and Future by Ed Conway (WH Allen)
• Right Kind of Wrong: Why Learning to Fail Can Teach Us to Thrive by Amy Edmondson (Cornerstone Press) 
• How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors Behind Every Successful Project, from Home Renovations to Space Exploration by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner (Macmillan) 
• Your Face Belongs to Us: The Secretive Startup Dismantling Your Privacy by Kashmir Hill (Simon & Schuster) 
• Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives by Siddharth Kara (Saint Martin’s Press)
• Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud by Ben McKenzie and Jacob Silverman (Abrams Press) 
• Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech by Brian Merchant (Little, Brown and Company)
• Tokens: The Future of Money in the Age of the Platform by Rachel O’Dwyer (Verso Books)
• Five Times Faster: Rethinking the Science, Economics, and Diplomacy of Climate Change by Simon Sharpe (Cambridge University Press)
• Unscripted: The Epic Battle for a Hollywood Media Empire by James B. Stewart and Rachel Abrams (Cornerstone)
• The Coming Wave: AI, Power and the Twenty-First Century’s Greatest Dilemma by Mustafa Suleyman with Michael Bhaskar (The Bodley Head)
• The Case for Good Jobs: How Great Companies Bring Dignity, Pay, and Meaning to Everyone’s Work by Zeynep Ton (Harvard Business Review Press)