Australian author Helen Garner won the £50,000 (about $65,215) Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction for her book How to End a Story: Collected Diaries (Pantheon). Since its founding as the Samuel Johnson Prize in 1999, this is the first time the award, which recognizes the best of nonfiction and is open to authors of any nationality, has gone to a diary.
Chair of judges Robbie Millen said: "After the mysterious alchemy of the judging process, Helen Garner emerged as our unanimous choice. All six judges agreed that How to End a Story, the first diaries to win the Baillie Gifford Prize, is a remarkable, addictive book. Garner takes the diary form, mixing the intimate, the intellectual, and the everyday, to new heights."
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We Live Here Now by C.D. Rose (Melville House) has won the £10,000 (about $13,050) Goldsmiths Prize, which honors fiction that "breaks the mould or extends the possibilities of the novel form," and is sponsored by Goldsmiths University and the New Statesman.
Chair of judges Amy Sackville said, "A book about what art is and what it does (or doesn't do), C.D. Rose's We Live Here Now in its turn asks profound questions of the contemporary world and the systems that power it, in the aether, deep under the surface, far out at sea. Motifs emerge and recur: containers, erasures, shady markets, sound and silence, 'echo and drone.' This constellatory novel tests the bounds of the form while delivering all of its satisfactions: at once hilarious and deeply haunting, intellectually challenging and supremely entertaining."