Simon Schama leads longlist for Baillie Gifford prize

Twelve finalists for £30,000 nonfiction award cover subjects ranging from Jewish history to modern jihad, Edward Lear and even gardening

Accounts of discord in the Middle East from the middle ages to the 21st century, a polemical analysis of race in Britain and a moving memoir about the curative effect of gardening are among the books longlisted for the 2017 Baillie Gifford prize for nonfiction.

The historian Simon Schama strides into contention for the £30,000 award with the second volume of The Story of the Jews, alongside Pulitzer prizewinner Anne Applebaum and her history of the disaster Stalin inflicted on Ukraine, Red Famine.

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