Booker Prize winner Richard Flanagan adds Baillie Gifford nonfiction prize to his trophy shelf

Associated Press

LONDON (AP) — Australian writer Richard Flanagan has won Britain’s leading nonfiction book prize, a decade after being awarded the Booker Prize for fiction. Flanagan was awarded the $63,000 Baillie Gifford Prize on Tuesday for his genre-bending memoir “Question 7.” He won the Booker Prize in 2014 for his novel “The Narrow Road to the Deep North.” Baillie Gifford Prize director Toby Mundy said that for the same writer to win the leading U.K.-based fiction and nonfiction awards was “completely unprecedented.” Chair of judges Isabel Hilton said Flanagan had written a “meditative symphony of a book” that lingers in the mind. Flanagan was trekking in Tasmania and not on hand to receive the trophy in person at a ceremony in London.