Helen Garner’s memoir wins 2025 Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction | Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction

Australian author Helen Garner has won the 2025 Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction for her book How to End a Story, becoming the first writer to win the prestigious award with a collection of memoirs.

The £50,000 award was announced on Tuesday evening at a ceremony held in London. Robbie Milne, chair of the judging panel and literary editor of The Times, described Garner’s collection as a “brilliant, addictive book” and said the decision had been made unanimously among the six judges. “Garner takes the memoir form—blending the intimate, the intellectual, and the everyday—to new heights.”

The Baillie Gifford Prize is widely considered the UK’s most prestigious award for non-fiction. It is Garner’s first major literary award in the UK, although she is one of Australia’s best-known authors, where her honors include the 2023 Australian Society of Authors Medal, the 2019 Australian Council Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature, and the 2006 Melbourne Literary Prize. She has also won the 2016 Wyndham-Campbell Literary Prize administered by Yale University.

Garner, 82, has long been known for her keen eye, often uncompromising in her examination of domestic life, creativity and morality. Born in Geelong, South Australia in 1942, she worked as a secondary school teacher and journalist before publishing her first novel, Monkey Grip, in 1977. Since then she has written novels, screenplays and non-fiction, including The Children’s Bach and This House of Grief.

How to End a Story brings together decades of Garner’s memoirs, tracing her life from bohemian Melbourne in the 1970s through an intense love affair in the 1980s to the collapse of her marriage in the 1990s. The entries are characterized by what the judges called “devastating honesty, sharp wit, and an ecstatic interest in the details of everyday life.”

Milne praised the breadth and humanity of the memoirs, which reach 832 pages. “It’s a big book, but Garner is such good company — funny, original, smart, self-deprecating, and always interesting — that we didn’t want the story to end,” he said.

How to End the Story was published to widespread critical acclaim. Rachel Cooke in The Observer called the diary “the greatest and richest journal by a writer since Virginia Woolf’s diaries.”

Garner’s next non-fiction work, The Mushroom Tapes: Conversations About a Triple Murder Trial, co-written by Chloe Hopper and Sarah Krasnostein, will be published in the UK on November 20, based on Erin Patterson’s infamous mushroom murder trial.

Baillie Gifford, the Edinburgh-based investment management company, which has sponsored the award since 2016, has come under fire in recent years over its investments in fossil fuels and companies with links to Israel. Last year, a boycott of sponsored literary festivals, organized by the Fossil Free Books campaign group, led to the end of partnerships between Baillie Gifford and nine festivals.

Last year’s winner, Australian author Richard Flanagan, said he would not accept the £50,000 prize money until the fund manager shared a plan to reduce its investments in fossil fuel extraction and increase investments in renewable energy sources. At a press conference held to announce the shortlist, prize director Toby Mundy said Flanagan had a “frank” conversation with the fund manager, but the end result was that the author did not accept the money and it would instead be donated to a literacy charity.

Besides Garner, the other films nominated this year were Jason Burke’s The Revolutionists, Richard Holmes’ The Boundless Deep, Justin Marozzi’s Captives and Companions, Adam Weymouth’s Lone Wolf, and Francis Wilson’s Electric Spark: The Enigma of Muriel Spark.

The Baillie Gifford Prize was originally established as the Samuel Johnson Prize in 1999. Previous winners include Antony Beevor, Jonathan Coe, Serhii Plokhy, Halle Rubenhold and Katherine Rundell.

This year’s judging panel consists of Milne, historian Pratinav Anil, journalist and broadcaster Inaya Folarin-Iman, author and former Baillie Gifford Prize winner Lucy Hughes-Hallett, The Economist’s deputy culture editor Rachel Lloyd, and author and biographer Peter Parker. The committee selected the winner from more than 350 books published between November 2024 and October 2025.

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