Tune into the latest episode of the Read Smart podcast, which is dedicated to Jennifer Homans and her #BGPrize2023 shortlisted work, Mr B: George Balanchine’s 20th Century. Recognized as the first major biography of the legendary choreographer and based on more than one hundred interviews, Jennifer’s work takes readers through the tumultuous life of the man who has been hailed by The New York Times as being the “Shakespeare of dancing.”

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The podcast is generously supported by the Blavatnik Family Foundation. Follow @BGPrize on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and YouTube.

Tune into this special shortlist edition of the Read Smart podcast, where Toby Mundy speaks to #BGPrize2023 shortlisted author Tania Branigan about her book, Red Memory: Living, Remembering and Forgetting China’s Cultural Revolution. Branigan’s book explores and uncovers forty years of rarely heard stories surrounding the Cultural Revolution, begging the question: what happens to the present when the past is repressed and buried?

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The podcast is generously supported by the Blavatnik Family Foundation. Follow @BGPrize on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and YouTube.

Tune into this special shortlist edition of the Read Smart podcast, where Razia Iqbal speaks to #BGPrize2023 shortlisted author Hannah Barnes about Time To Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock’s Gender Service for Children. Through unprecedented access to thousands of pages of documents, internal emails, unpublished reports and personal testimony from former GIDS clinicians, Hannah’s book investigates the controversial story behind the NHS’s flagship gender service for children.

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The podcast is generously supported by the Blavatnik Family Foundation. Follow @BGPrize on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and YouTube.

Up next on the Read Smart podcast, host Toby Mundy speaks with 2023 shortlisted author Christopher Clark. Christopher’s book, Revolutionary Spring: Europe Aflame and the Fight for a New World, 1848-1849, details this extraordinary year in European history, where demonstrators rebelled against societal structures, governments and armies lost control and revolutionary sparks flew across all of Europe’s cities.

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The podcast is generously supported by the Blavatnik Family Foundation. Follow @BGPrize on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and YouTube.

It’s the latest episode of the Read Smart podcast, and today Toby Mundy will be speaking to another one of this year’s shortlisted authors: John Vaillant. John’s work Fire Weather explores the apocalyptic wildfire that took place in Fort McMurray in 2016, as well as the past and future of our increasingly flammable world. The shortlisted book delves into the intertwining histories of the oil industry and climate science, alongside the urgent reality that our planet currently faces.

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The podcast is generously supported by the Blavatnik Family Foundation. Follow @BGPrize on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and YouTube.

Tune into the first of our Read Smart special shortlist episodes, where we will be chatting to all six of this year’s shortlisted authors in the run up to the winner announcement. First up, Prize Director Toby Mundy speaks to Jeremy Eichler, author of Time’s Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust and the Music of Remembrance about how music bears witness to history and carries forward the memory of the past.

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The podcast is generously supported by the Blavatnik Family Foundation. Follow @BGPrize on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and YouTube.

Tune into this special shortlist episode of the Read Smart podcast, which features the Baillie Gifford Prize live event from Cheltenham Literature Festival. Hear Chair of Judges Frederick Studemann speak to last year’s winner, Katherine Rundell, about her fascination for the electric life and work of poet John Donne, alongside the moment the six books on this year’s shortlist were revealed.

The 2023 Baillie Gifford Prize Longlist:

Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock’s Gender Service for Children by Hannah Barnes • Red Memory by Tania Branigan • Revolutionary Spring: Fighting for a New World 1848-1849 by Christopher Clark • Time’s Echo: The Second World War, The Holocaust, and The Music of Remembrance by Jeremy Eichler • Mr. B: George Balanchine’s Twentieth Century by Jennifer Homans • Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World by John Vaillant

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The podcast is generously supported by the Blavatnik Family Foundation. Follow @BGPrize on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and YouTube.

The Read Smart podcast returns with two of our 2023 judges – Arifa Akbar and Ruth Scurr – delving into the 2023 longlist with our host, Razia Iqbal. Spanning the complex themes of war, memory, revolution and science, this year’s longlist illuminates a myriad of historical topics, bringing to life forgotten stories that address the most urgent concerns for our future.

The 2023 Baillie Gifford Prize Longlist:

Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity by Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson • Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock’s Gender Service for Children by Hannah Barnes • Red Memory by Tania Branigan • Revolutionary Spring: Fighting for a New World 1848-1849 by Christopher Clark • Time’s Echo: The Second World War, The Holocaust, and The Music of Remembrance by Jeremy Eichler • The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder by David Grann • Mr. B: George Balanchine’s Twentieth Century by Jennifer Homans • Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949-1990 by Katja Hoyer • All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake by Tiya Miles • The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human by Siddhartha Mukherjee • A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: A Palestine Story by Nathan Thrall • Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World by John Vaillant • Ultra Processed People: Why Do We All Eat Stuff That Isn’t Food … and Why Can’t We Stop? by Chris van Tulleken

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The podcast is generously supported by the Blavatnik Family Foundation. Follow @BGPrize on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and YouTube.

On this episode of the Read Smart Podcast, our host Shahidha Bari was joined by food writer Bee Wilson and Tom Tivnan, managing editor of The Bookseller, to delve into the fascinating, complex and endlessly enjoyable genre of food writing. In this episode, Shahidha and our guests discuss the role the pandemic has played in the role of the cook book in our society, the controversial participation of celebrities in the genre and the influence of famous campaigners battling food poverty.

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The podcast is generously supported by the Blavatnik Family Foundation. Follow @BGPrize on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and YouTube.

On this episode of the Read Smart Podcast, released shortly after the Ukraine Invasion began, we were joined by Sir Antony Beevor, a multi-award winning historian of war whose book Stalingrad, which recounted the battle between Russian and German forces in Eastern Europe in the Second World War, won the very first Samuel Johnson Prize – the precursor to the Baillie Gifford Prize. His new book is Russia: Revolution and Civil War 1917-1921.
Antony is joined by Serhii Plokhii, the professor of Ukrainian history at Harvard University, who won the 2018 Baillie Gifford Prize for Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy.
Joining Antony and Serhii is Polly Jones, the professor of Russian at The University of Oxford, who recently wrote an introduction to Ukrainian author Vassily Grossman’s epic novel Life and Fate. This episode is hosted by author and critic Shahidha Bari.

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The podcast is generously supported by the Blavatnik Family Foundation. Follow @BGPrize on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and YouTube.