Richard Flanagan, who won the Booker Prize for fiction in 2014, has become the first author in history to achieve the “unprecedented double” after being named the winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize for non-fiction.

Richard Flanagan has won the Baillie Gifford Prize for non-fiction for Question 7, a work that is part history and part memoir, which the judges described as a “meditative symphony of a book”. It is the first time in its 26-year history that the UK’s leading non-fiction prize has been awarded to an author who has also won the Booker Prize.

Question 7 by Richard Flanagan is tonight named winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction 2024. The winner was announced by Chair of Judges, Isabel Hilton, at a ceremony hosted at BMA House in London,