Australia author Richard Flanagan’s Question 7 is the 2024 winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize for nonfiction. Part-memoir, part-novel, part-history, Question 7 charts Flanagan’s attempt to understand his parents and Tasmania, where he is from. The jury awarded the prize to the book for being an “astonishingly accomplished meditation on memory, history, trauma, love and death – and an intricately woven exploration of the chains of consequence that frame a life.”
However, in his acceptance speech, Flanagan said he would not accept the £50,000 prize money until the fund manager assures him that they’ll reduce its investment in fossil fuel extraction and increase investments in renewables. He added, “And were I not to speak of the terrifying impact fossil fuels are having on my island home, that same vanishing world that spurred me to write Question 7, I would be untrue to the spirit of my book.”
Baillie Gifford, which has sponsored the prize since 2016, has been criticised because of its investments in fossil fuels and companies linked to Israel. Earlier this year, literary festival boycotts organised by campaign group Fossil Free Books led to the termination of partnerships between Baillie Gifford and nine festivals.
The Booker Prize and the Baillie Gifford are widely regarded as the UK’s most prestigious literary prizes, for fiction and nonfiction, respectively. Flanagan won the Booker Prize in 2014, for his novel about a Tasmanian doctor who becomes a Japanese prisoner of war in The Narrow Road to the Deep North.