2004 - Shortlist

‘STYLISTICALLY INNOVATIVE’ NON-FICTION DOMINATES STRONG LIST WITH INTERNATIONAL FLAVOUR

The judges for the UK’s most valuable prize for non-fiction today, Tuesday 4 May, announce the shortlist for the BBC FOUR Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction 2004. The prize is worth £30,000 to the winner, and £1,000 to each of the 6 shortlisted authors.

The 2004 shortlist comprises:
you can click on the book title to read a sysnopsis of the book

Author	Title	Publisher
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
Anna Funder	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

The BBC FOUR Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction celebrates originality and diversity in contemporary non-fiction publishing.

The 2004 shortlist this year includes a fresh look at Rome’s experiment with republicanism; a vision of Africa through the eyes of a young war reporter; a moving and detailed account of the Gulag, the Soviet regime’s central terror institution; Cold War Berlin through the eyes of ordinary men and women; the story of the greatest labouring-class poet that England has produced, John Clare, and a quest to understand everything from the Big Bang to the rise of civilisation.

read judges comments >