Enjoy a prize Festival

Tania Branigan has now been shortlisted for two of the most prestigious prizes in the business: the Baillie Gifford Prize for non-fiction and the equally influential Cundill History Prize. This is a magnificent achievement, particularly for a debut work, and we are looking forward to Tania’s event with renewed anticipation! 

But Red Memory is by no means the only award-winning talk in store. Anthony Joseph, poet/ writer/ musician, has won the TS Eliot Prize for Poetry for Sonnets for Albert just one of a string of awards Anthony’s hugely successful and varied work has attracted.

Caroline Dodds Pennock won the Royal Historical Society’s Gladstone Prize for her first ever book and has this year been chosen to deliver the Voltaire Lecture, the latest in a long line of distinguished writers and historians to receive this honour. Caroline is the UK’s only Aztec historian! 

David Reynolds, Professor of International History at Cambridge, counts the Wolfson Prize and PEN Hesell Tiltman amongst his many awards while Stephen Moss has been shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize, an award for excellent nature writing. 

Jolyon Maugham was shortlisted for an impressive three legal awards in a single year and Luke O’Neill, one of the world’s leading scientists, won the Irish non-fiction Book of the Year as well as an Honorary Lifetime Membership Award from the International Cytokine and Interferon Society.

Many of our speakers have books which are too new to have qualified for awards – as yet. But they are already receiving accolades from on high. Marcus du Sautoy’s Around the World in Eighty Games is out this week. Watch out for some great reviews!

And following Emily Kenway’s talk on modern day slavery at our 2021 Festival, we are delighted that Who Cares is enjoying equal acclaim and was a finalist in the 2023 Orwell Prize for Political Writing.