Helen Garner wins 2025 Baillie Gifford Prize for How to End a Story
Australian writer Helen Garner has been awarded the 2025 Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction for How to End a Story, becoming the first author to win the UK’s most prestigious nonfiction award with a collection of diaries.
Announced at a ceremony in London, the judges praised Garner’s book as “remarkable” and “addictive”, noting the way she elevates the diary form by blending the intimate, the intellectual and the everyday. The prize includes an award of £50,000.
How to End a Story gathers decades of Garner’s journals, tracing her life from bohemian Melbourne in the 1970s through a passionate love affair in the 1980s to the unravelling of her marriage in the 1990s. The collection has been widely celebrated for its honesty, sharp humour and close attention to the emotional texture of ordinary life.
Garner, now 82, is one of Australia’s most acclaimed writers. Her career spans fiction, criticism, screenwriting and reportage, beginning with her landmark 1977 debut Monkey Grip. Her honours in Australia include the ASA Medal, the Australia Council Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature, and the Melbourne Prize for Literature.
Critics in the UK have responded with similar admiration. The Observer called the diaries “the greatest, richest journals by a writer since Virginia Woolf’s”.
Garner’s next nonfiction work, The Mushroom Tapes: Conversations on a Triple Murder Trial, co-authored with Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein, will be published in the UK on 20 November.
