Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich has been longlisted for the UK’s most prestigious award for nonfiction writing for her collage of voices from the collapsing USSR, Second-Hand Time.
Alexievich won the Nobel prize for literature in 2015 for her “polyphonic writings”, praised as a “monument to suffering and courage in our time” by the Swedish Academy. She is one of 10 writers, chosen from more than 180 submissions, to make the longlist for the £30,000 Baillie Gifford prize for nonfiction.
Formerly known as the Samuel Johnson prize, the award is open to books published in English by writers of any nationality, and has been won in the past by books covering a wide variety of subjects, from Helen Macdonald’s memoir about grief and falconry, H Is for Hawk, to Steve Silberman’s study of autism, Neurotribes.
Published by small independent press Fitzcarraldo Editions, the Belarusian journalist’s Second-Hand Time collects Alexievich’s interviews conducted between 1991 and 2012, documenting the collapse of the USSR in what the Swedish Academy called “a new kind of literary genre”.
“I don’t ask people about socialism, I ask about love, jealousy, childhood, old age. Music, dances, hairstyles. The myriad sundry details of a vanished way of life. This is the only way to chase the catastrophe into the framework of the mundane and attempt to tell a story. Try to figure things out,” Alexievich writes, in Bela Shayevich’s translation.
Alexievich’s title was chosen by a judging panel chaired by Stephanie Flanders alongside an eclectic list of contenders ranging from history to popular science. Charles Foster makes the cut for Being a Beast, in which the author experiments with living life as a badger, urban fox and otter, while Frances Wilson was picked for a more traditional slice of nonfiction, her life of Thomas De Quincey, Guilty Thing.
The award-winning Libyan novelist Hisham Matar makes the longlist with The Return, a memoir about going back to the country two decades after his father was kidnapped in Egypt and taken to prison in Libya, never to be seen by his family again. American author Margo Jefferson is also chosen for a piece of autobiography – a memoir of her childhood among Chicago’s black elite, Negroland.
Observer art critic Laura Cumming is longlisted for The Vanishing Man, which examines the life of painter Diego Velázquez alongside the tale of a Victorian bookseller obsessed with him, while Simon Ings’s Stalin and the Scientists tells the secret history of Soviet science, and Ben Judah was picked for his look at life in the UK’s capital city through a series of portraits of its immigrant population, This Is London.
Siddhartha Mukherjee’s history of genetics The Gene is woven through with the author’s family story, while lawyer Philippe Sands also weaves his family history into an exploration of the origins of international law, beginning and ending with the last day of the Nuremberg trial, East West Street.
Flanders, the former BBC economics editor, said that each of the longlisted titles “takes you on a journey that is as engrossing and imaginative as any novel”.
“They aim high, and deliver. I am not looking forward to having to choose between them,” said Flanders, who was joined on the judging panel by the writers Philip Ball and Sophie Ratcliffe, the Financial Times’s Jonathan Derbyshire and Rohan Silva, co-founder of the social enterprise Second Home. The panel will announce their shortlist on 17 October, with the winner unveiled on 15 November.
The 2016 Baillie Gifford prize longlist:
- Second-Hand Time by Svetlana Alexievich, translated by Bela Shayevich (Fitzcarraldo Editions)
- The Vanishing Man by Laura Cumming (Chatto & Windus)
- Being a Beast by Charles Foster (Profile Books)
- Stalin and the Scientists by Simon Ings (Faber & Faber)
- Negroland: A Memoir by Margo Jefferson (Granta Books)
- This Is London by Ben Judah (Picador)
- The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between by Hisham Matar (Viking)
- The Gene by Siddhartha Mukherjee (Bodley Head)
- East West Street by Philippe Sands (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
- Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas De Quincey by Frances Wilson (Bloomsbury)
