2004 - Longlist

“Grand sweep history”, “left-of-field travelogues” and “unexpected oddities” make this year’s wide-ranging longlist

The judges for the UK’s most valuable prize for non-fiction announce the longlist for the BBC Four Samuel Johnson Prize 2004, today (Friday 19 March). £30,000 goes to the winner to reward the best of non-fiction published in the UK today.

From 120 entries and 5 call-ins, the 23 titles on the longlist range widely in subject matter. From Eastern Europe and Russia in the last century to an analysis of our planet’s survival in the future; journeying from London’s Hoxton to Africa’s Zanzibar, and exploring the characters of George Orwell, Margaret Thatcher and John McEnroe; this year’s BBC FOUR Samuel Johnson Prize longlist is diverse, thought-provoking and entertaining.

Michael Wood, Chair of the judges, comments:

‘We have already had a lot of fun whittling down a huge and impressive entry. The longlist seems to all of us to epitomise the best of UK non-fiction today, in both its variety and its quality: from grand sweep history to first-rate political and literary biography, and from left-of-field travelogues to some terrific and unexpected oddities. It’s not often you can say this of a literary prize, but every book on this long list is a work of real character and interest.’

The judges for the 2004 prize are: writer and broadcaster, Michael Wood (Chair); author, broadcaster and journalist, Aminatta Forna; political editor of BBC TV’s Newsnight, Martha Kearney; science writer and broadcaster, Simon Singh; and author, journalist and broadcaster, Francis Wheen.

The shortlist for the prize will be announced at Samuel Johnson’s House on Tuesday 4 May.  The winner of The BBC Four Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction 2004 will be announced at an awards dinner at the Savoy Hotel in London on Tuesday 15 June.

THE LONGLIST:

Author	Title	Publisher
Tim Adams	On Being John McEnroe	Yellow Jersey Press
Anne Applebaum	Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps	Allen Lane/Penguin
Jonathan Bate	John Clare: A Biography	Picador
Bill Bryson	A Short History of Nearly Everything	Doubleday
James  Buchan	Capital of the Mind: How Edinburgh Changed the World	John Murray
John Campbell	Margaret Thatcher Vol 2:The Iron Lady	Jonathan Cape
Kate Colquhoun	A Thing in Disguise: The Visionary Life of Joseph Paxton	4th Estate
David   Edmonds & John Eidinow	Bobby Fischer Goes to War: How the Soviets Lost the Most Extraordinary Match of All Time	Faber & Faber
Anna Funder	Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall	Granta
Aidan  Hartley	The Zanzibar Chest: A Memoir of Love and War	HarperCollins
Tom Holland	Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the RomanRepublic	Little, Brown
John Keay	Sowing the Wind	John Murray
Mark Lynas	High Tide: News from a  Warming World	Flamingo
Graham Robb	Rimbaud	Picador
Lorna Sage	Bad Blood	4th Estate
Diarmaid MacCulloch	Reformation: Europe’s House Divided 1490 - 1700	Allen Lane/Penguin
Robert Macfarlane	Mountains of the Mind: A History of Fascination	Granta
Robert Skidelsky	John Maynard Keynes	Macmillan
In Siberia	Colin Thubron	Chatto & Windus
Karl Marx	Francis Wheen	4th Estate
Bryan  Magee	Clouds of Glory: A Hoxton Childhood	Jonathan Cape
Martin Rees	Our Final Century	Heinemann
Simon Sebag Montefiore	Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar	Weidenfeld & Nicolson
Francis Spufford	Backroom Boys: The Secret Return of the British Boffin	Faber & Faber
D.J. Taylor	Orwell  : The Life	Chatto & Windus
Hugh Thomas	Rivers of Gold: The Rise of the Spanish Empire	Weidenfeld & Nicolson
Lynne  Truss	Eats, Shoots and Leaves	Profile
The Journals of a White Sea Wolf	Mariusz Wilk	Harvill Press