'A horror story': history of Chernobyl nuclear disaster wins Baillie Gifford prize

Ukrainian author Serhii Plokhy, who grew up downstream from the damaged reactor, wins £30,000 prize for Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy

A Harvard history professor’s “haunting” account of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster, which delves into the “heartbreaking stories of heroism” from the people who helped to prevent the whole of Europe from becoming uninhabitable, has won the £30,000 Baillie Gifford prize for non-fiction.

Serhii Plokhy’s Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy opens as a radiation alarm goes off in a power plant in Sweden, and as staff begin to suspect a Soviet accident. It goes on to lay out what led to the worst nuclear disaster in history, telling the stories of the firefighters, scientists, soldiers, engineers and policemen who worked to extinguish the nuclear inferno in Chernobyl on 26 April 1986. One of more than 200 books submitted for the Baillie Gifford prize, it beat a shortlist that also featured Carl Zimmer’s look at the science of inheritance, She Has Her Mother’s Laugh; Stephen R Platt’s history of the first opium war, Imperial Twilight; and Hannah Fry’s exploration of what it means to be human in the age of the machine, Hello World.

Related: Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy by Serhii Plokhy review – Europe nearly became uninhabitable

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