An acclaimed biography of Alexander the Great wins the Baillie Gifford
nonfiction prize
[November 05, 2026]
By JILL LAWLESS
LONDON (AP) — An “immersive” biography of Alexander the Great won the
prestigious Baillie Gifford Prize for nonfiction Wednesday, in the
latest sign of booming interest in the world of ancient Greece.
Edmund Richardson’s “Alexander: God, King, Man” was named winner of the
50,000 pound ($67,000) prize at a ceremony in London.
British journalist Kirsty Lang, who chaired the judging panel, said the
book is the first work of ancient history to win the prize and “reads
like a novel.”
“It’s very immersive. You really feel that you’re there on the
battlefield, marching across Central Asia and Egypt with Alexander,” she
said. “And it contains a lot of new research,” including Richardson’s
translations of sources from 12 ancient languages.
Richardson, a professor of classics at Durham University in England,
spent a decade — “far too long, down far too many rabbit holes” —
researching the life of Alexander, who inherited a debt-ridden
Macedonian kingdom at 20, conquered territory stretching from Greece to
India and died at 32.
“No one called him Alexander the Great in his lifetime,” Richardson told
The Associated Press. “No one thought he was going to conquer the world.
He was his father’s slightly disappointing son, even when he took the
throne. He was a tributary, not the main event. And then he starts to do
all of these astonishing things.”
Richardson said Alexander’s military expedition “transforms reality more
profoundly than almost any other event in human history.”
“It connects the world up in ways that it has never been connected
before,” he said. “It results in this flood of knowledge and
understanding and ideas and religious belief and science and astronomy
and art, crossing from Babylon to Greece, from Greece to modern-day
Afghanistan, from Egypt across to Italy."
The prize judges called the book “a love letter to the humanities and
the work of historians and archaeologists,” at a time when those
disciplines are under pressure from university funding cuts in the U.K.
and elsewhere.
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The photo provided by the Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction shows
Edmund Richardson, winner of the 2026 Baillie Gifford Prize, with
his book “Alexander: God, King, Man,” at an award ceremony in
London, Wednesday, Nov. 4, 2026. (David Parry/Baillie Gifford Prize
for Nonfiction via AP)
 Lang said the book should appeal to
fans of Christopher Nolan’s epic movie version of “The Odyssey,”
which has helped drive a surge of popular interest in the ancient
Greek classics.
“They knew to tell great stories,” Lang said. “Life, death, love,
relationships, tragedy. They speak to the most basic of human
emotions and motivations.”
Founded in 1999, the Baillie Gifford prize recognizes
English-language books in current affairs, history, politics,
science, sport, travel, biography, autobiography and the arts. It
has been credited with bringing an eclectic slate of fact-based
books to a wider audience.
The winner was chosen from more than 350 entries and beat five other
finalists, including American journalist Patrick Radden Keefe’s
bestseller “London Falling,” the true story of a teenager who died
after being caught up in the shadowy world of London’s superrich.
The other finalists were Nicholas Boggs’ James Baldwin biography
“Baldwin: A Love Story”; Matthew Sweet’s life of romance novelist
Barbara Cartland, “The Great Dictator”; Anand Gopal’s Syrian saga
“Days of Love and Rage”; and Andrea Wulf’s “The Traveler,” about the
18th-century naturalist and explorer George Forster.
Last year’s winner was Australian writer Helen Garner for her
collected diaries, “How to End a Story.”
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