Philippe Sands Clinches Britain's Biggest Non-Fiction Prize

In what Daniel Finkelstein in The Times described as ‘a work of great brilliance… everything that happens is inevitable and yet comes as a surprise… in places I gasped, in places I wept,’ East West Street is both a history of atrocity and a relentless, brilliantly-pitched search for the truth. By seeking out the decimated past of his own family, Sands unearths the then-controversial origins of international human rights itself.

Philippe Sands offers a complex but effortlessly-structured narrative of interlinked lives. At its heart lie the two legal minds who together brought into our syntax the notions of ‘crimes against humanity’ and ‘genocide’, but Sands – himself an international human rights lawyer – brings to bear a remarkably exhaustive level of research to exhume layer after layer of forgotten detail, unerringly focused on filling in the gaping tragedies of his family’s history. In the process, he both wrestles with the outcome of the laws created at the time and delineates the death machine built to destroy an entire people.

From a superlative shortlist, Philippe Sands’ East West Street has emerged as a worthy victor and we offer the author our heartfelt congratulations. Of course, the remaining three nominees for this most prestigious of prizes still offer rich investigation – Hisham Matar’s The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land In Between, the bruising but wise account of a son’s search for his father, abducted by Gaddafi’s Libya; Svetlana Alexievich’s Second-Hand Time, the  Nobel-winning journalist’s powerful post-Soviet literary tapestry; and Negroland: A Memoir from critic Margo Jefferson, a searching reflection on the author’s own African-American bourgeois origins.

With its change of name, it seems resolutely clear that the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction has lost none of its perceptive edge and that Philippe Sands’ East West Street surely sets the bar for the award’s future.