Edmund Richardson wins Baillie Gifford Prize for Alexander biography

Edmund Richardson has won the 2026 Baillie Gifford Prize for nonfiction for Alexander: God, King, Man, his account of Alexander the Great’s life. It is the first ancient-history book to win the award since its founding in 1999.

Richardson, a classics professor at Durham University, received the £50,000 prize (about $67,000) at a ceremony in London on the evening of 4 November. The award is his first major literary prize, The Guardian said. The preceding edition went to Australian writer Helen Garner for her collected diaries, How to End a Story.

Research behind the biography

Judging chair Kirsty Lang, a broadcaster, praised the book’s narrative momentum, research and literary craft. The other judges were novelist Elif Shafak, Waterstones head of books Bea Carvalho, writer and cultural historian Tiffany Jenkins, Spectator literary editor Sam Leith, and editor and reporter Ravi Mattu. She said Richardson combined new technology and recent archaeological discoveries to tell the story of a leader whose empire stretched from ancient Greece to the Indian subcontinent.

The book follows Alexander from 336 BC, when he took charge of a nearly bankrupt kingdom at age 20, through his conquest of the Persian empire to his death in Babylon at 32. Richardson drew on more than a decade of research across four continents and translated sources from 12 ancient languages himself. The book also uses recent finds, including newly decoded records kept by Babylonian astronomers during Alexander’s time.

The field

Judges chose the winner from a six-book shortlist, after more than 350 eligible titles published between 1 November 2025 and 31 October 2026 were narrowed to a longlist of 13 in September. The award began in 1999 as the Samuel Johnson Prize and has been sponsored by investment management firm Baillie Gifford since 2016.

The other shortlisted books were Patrick Radden Keefe’s London Falling, Andrea Wulf’s The Traveller, Matthew Sweet’s The Great Dictator, Nicholas Boggs’s Baldwin: A Love Story and Anand Gopal’s Days of Love and Rage.