By Karim Hammam
Edmund Richardson's biography "Alexander: God, King, Man" has won the prestigious Baillie Gifford Prize for nonfiction, marking the first time a work of ancient history has claimed the award. The £50,000 ($67,000) prize was announced at a ceremony in London on Wednesday.
Chair of the judging panel, journalist Kirsty Lang, described the book as immersive and novelistic, noting that readers feel present on the battlefield marching across Central Asia and Egypt with Alexander. She highlighted Richardson's new research, including translations from 12 ancient languages.
Richardson, a professor of classics at Durham University, spent a decade researching the Macedonian conqueror who inherited a debt-ridden kingdom at 20, built an empire stretching from Greece to India, and died at 32. Richardson emphasized that Alexander was not called "the Great" in his lifetime and was initially seen as his father's disappointing son.
The author argued that Alexander's military expedition transformed reality more profoundly than almost any other event in human history, connecting cultures from Babylon to Greece, Egypt to Italy, and Greece to modern-day Afghanistan in an unprecedented exchange of knowledge, religion, science, and art.
The judges called the book a love letter to the humanities and the work of historians and archaeologists, particularly relevant as those disciplines face university funding cuts in the U.K. Lang also linked the win to a surge of popular interest in ancient Greek classics, fueled partly by Christopher Nolan's upcoming film adaptation of "The Odyssey."
The winner was chosen from more than 350 entries and beat five other finalists: Patrick Radden Keefe's "London Falling," Nicholas Boggs' "Baldwin: A Love Story," Matthew Sweet's "The Great Dictator," Anand Gopal's "Days of Love and Rage," and Andrea Wulf's "The Traveler." Last year's winner was Helen Garner for "How to End a Story."
