www.thesamueljohnsonprize.co.uk

The BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction is one of the UK’s most prestigious literary prizes. Worth £20,000 to the winning author, it is the 12^th year of the prize which aims to reward the best non-fiction published in the UK, from biography, travel and popular science to the arts and current affairs.

The panel for the 2010 Prize is announced today, 5 February. Chaired by Evan Davis, economist, journalist and BBC presenter, the panel consists of author and arts editor for the Financial Times, Jan Dalley; executive editor of The Times Daniel Finkelstein; science journalist, author and broadcaster, Roger Highfield; and best-selling historian Stella Tillyard.

Davis comments, “When you think of all the English language non-fiction books that are published each year, narrowing the field down to one winner is a formidable challenge. In fact, it's such a large and exciting task, I'm telling my friends not to call me for the next six months.”

The worldwide reputation of the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize is such that the winning author may expect a significant increase in sales and recognition.  

The prize is open to authors of all non-fiction books published in the UK, regardless of nationality or of origin. The longlist, which features approximately twenty titles, will be announced in late-April. The shortlist of up to six titles will be announced in late-May.

The judges will announce the winner of the Prize at an awards event in central London in early July. The winner receives £20,000, and each of the five shortlisted authors, £1,000.

Former Winners

1999                Stalingrad by Antony Beevor (Penguin)

2000                Berlioz: Servitude and Greatness by David Cairns (The Penguin Press)

2001                The Third Reich: A New History by Michael Burleigh (Macmillan)

2002                Peacemakers: The Paris Peace Conference of 1919 by Margaret Macmillan (John Murray)

2003                Pushkin: A biography by T.J. Binyon (HarperCollins)

2004                Stasiland by Anna Funder (Granta)

2005                Like a Fiery Elephant by Jonathan Coe (Picador)

2006                1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare by James Shapiro (Faber & Faber)

2007                Imperial Life in the Emerald City by Rajiv Chandrasekaran (Bloomsbury)

2008                The Suspicions of Mr Whicher by Kate Summerscale (Bloomsbury)

2009                Leviathan or The Whale by Philip Hoare (Fourth Estate)

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Notes to Editors

·         Photographs of the judges and the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction logo are available from Colman Getty

·         The judges may be available for interview and can be contacted through Colman Getty

·         The longlist of 20 books will be announced in late April; a shortlist of six will be announced in late May

·         The winner will be announced in early July

·         The BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction is open to books in the areas of current affairs, history, politics, science, sport, travel, biography, autobiography and the arts. Books published in English by writers of any nationality are eligible for the prize, provided they are published in the UK between 1 May 2009 and 30 April 2010

·         The BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction is managed by a steering committee and administered by Colman Getty. The steering committee is made up of Stuart Proffitt, Chair, (Publishing Director, Penguin), Antony Beevor (historian and author), Mark Bell (BBC Commissioning Editor, Speicialist Factual and Independents), Peter Florence (Director of the Guardian Hay Festival),  Dotti Irving (Chief Executive, Colman Getty),  Mervyn King (Governor, The Bank of England), Toby Mundy, (CEO of Atlantic Books), James Naughtie (broadcaster, BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme), Alan Rusbridger (Editor of The Guardian), Peter Straus (literary agent, Rogers, Coleridge and White) and Martin Taylor (International Adviser for Goldman Sachs)

The Judges

Evan Davis is a presenter on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme. He also hosts the Radio 4 business discussion programme, The Bottom Line and Dragons’ Den on BBC2. Evan has been at the BBC since 1993 and has spent most of his career reporting economics, working first as a correspondent across the news programmes, including Newsnight, and finally succeeding Peter Jay in the role of overall BBC Economics Editor. In that role, he wrote a popular blog, Evanomics.

Jan Dalley is the author of the biography Diana Moseley and the arts editor of the Financial Times. She was also previously the paper's literary editor, and is the author of numerous features and reviews on the arts and books, as well as a fortnightly column in the FT Weekend section. Jan's most recent book is The Black Hole, an account of the infamous Black Hole of Calcutta.

Daniel Finkelstein is executive editor of The Times. His blog, Comment Central, is a personal round up of the best political opinion on the web. Before joining the paper in 2001, he was adviser to both Prime Minister John Major and Conservative leader William Hague.

Roger Highfield is the editor of New Scientist magazine. He has written/co-authored half a dozen books, including The Private Lives of Albert Einstein (currently under development as a biopic); The Physics of Christmas and the bestseller, The Arrow of Time. For two decades, until 2008, he was the science editor of The Daily Telegraph, where he won various prizes for journalism, including a British Press Award, organised a long running science writing competition, and developed mass experiments with the BBC. For his doctoral research at Oxford he became the first person to bounce a neutron off a soap bubble.

Stella Tillyard is the author of five books, including Aristocrats (which was made into a BBC/WGBH Masterpiece Theater series), Citizen Lord and A Royal Affair. She was 2009 Irish Government Farmleigh Writer in Residence, is a Visiting Scholar at the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters at Queen Mary, University of London, and writes for Prospect, the TLS and The Sunday Times. Her novel set in the Regency period, Tides of War, will be published in 2011.