‘Blockbuster’ history of Alexander the Great wins £50,000 Baillie Gifford prize

Edmund Richardson has won the 2026 Baillie Gifford prize for nonfiction for Alexander: God, King, Man, his account of the life of Alexander the Great, becoming the first writer to win the prize for an ancient history book.

Richardson was awarded the £50,000 prize at a ceremony in London on Wednesday evening, beating a six-strong shortlist that included former winner Patrick Radden Keefe’s London Falling.

The chair of judges, broadcaster Kirsty Lang, described the book as “blockbuster history” with “page-turning narrative pull”, and a “cracking cinematic story about the ancient world involving a masterful assembly of research materials alongside exceptional literary craft”.

Richardson, she added, “combines the use of new technology and recent archaeological discoveries to tell the story of an extraordinary leader who conquered an empire stretching from ancient Greece to the Indian subcontinent”. It is the first book of ancient history to win the prize since it was founded in 1999.

The book traces Alexander’s life from 336BC, when at 20 he took charge of a near-bankrupt kingdom and a barely controllable army, through his conquest of the Persian empire, to his death in Babylon aged 32. Richardson drew on more than a decade of research across four continents, and translated sources from 12 ancient languages himself. He also folds in recent archaeological finds, including newly decoded records kept by Babylonian astronomers of Alexander’s time.

Richardson’s win caps a bumper year for the classical world. Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation of The Odyssey sent sales of Homer’s epic soaring, and last month the Canadian poet and classicist Anne Carson, whose work is steeped in ancient Greek literature, was awarded the Nobel prize.

The Baillie Gifford is the first major prize for Richardson, a professor of classics at Durham University whose previous books include Alexandria: The Quest for the Lost City (2021) and Classical Victorians: Scholars, Scoundrels and Generals in Pursuit of Antiquity (2013).

Alexander: God, King, Man was chosen from a shortlist that also included previous winner Radden Keefe’s runaway success London Falling, an investigation into the death of Zac Brettler, a British teenager who fell from a luxury London apartment after posing as the son of a wealthy Russian oligarch. Also shortlisted were 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.

Lang was joined on the judging panel by the 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. The winner was selected from more than 350 eligible titles published between 1 November 2025 and 31 October 2026, narrowed to a longlist of 13 in September.

The award was founded in 1999 as the Samuel Johnson prize, and has been sponsored by investment management firm Baillie Gifford since 2016. Last year, it was won by the Australian writer Helen Garner for her collected diaries, How to End a Story. Past winners include Antony Beevor, Jonathan Coe, Serhii Plokhy, Hallie Rubenhold and Katherine Rundell.

Alexander by Edmund Richardson (Bloomsbury, £25). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.