Waterstones booksellers champion Baillie Gifford's Winner of Winners shortlist

Six young Waterstones booksellers are championing the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction Winner of Winners Award shortlist ahead of the winner announcement later this week. 

The Winner of Winners Award is a one-off £25,000 cash prize to mark 25 years of the award, set to be announced on Thursday 27th April. As part of the anniversary celebrations, and in collaboration with Waterstones, booksellers who are around 25 years of age have been called to champion the shortlisted works and make a case for reading non-fiction.

Six former prize-winners were selected for the Winner of Winners Award shortlist, with titles covering everything from Shakespeare and The Beatles to climbing Everest, and from the Paris Peace Conference to the Sackler Dynasty and North Korea.

The young booksellers, each assigned a title from the shortlist, include Hope, who works in the fiction and non-fiction teams at Waterstones’ head office, and who has been championing One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time (Fourth Estate), the 2020 winning title by Craig Brown. Meanwhile Elizabeth, a junior bookseller at Waterstones, Merry Hill, is focusing on Patrick Radden Keefe’s Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty (Picador), which won in 2021.

 Hatchards bookseller Siena is supporting the 2002 winner, Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed The World (John Murray Press), while Ben, an area commercial support and events co-ordinator at the Waterstones Oxford branch, is championing Barbara Demick Nothing to Envy: Real Lives in North Korea (Granta), the 2010 winner.

James Shapiro’s 2006 winning title, 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (Faber), was assigned to Eve, who joined Waterstones in 2014 as a bookseller and now works as commercial strategy support at the head office. Finally, Beatrice, a senior bookseller at Hatchards, Cheltenham, is focusing on Wide Davis’ 2012 winner, Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest (The Bodley Head).
While the judges Jason Cowley, Shahidha Bari, Sarah Churchwell and Frances Wilson re-read the shortlist ahead of the final meeting, followers of the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction on social media will be hearing from these young readers about what makes these books compelling reads.

The Baillie Gifford Prize was founded in 1998 by publisher Stuart Proffitt and PR executive Dotti Irving. Known as the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-fiction, the first award was presented at London’s Banqueting House in 1999 to Antony Beevor for his book Stalingrad. 

The winner of the anniversary award will be announced at an event held at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh.