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

By Jill Lawless

Australian writer Richard Flanagan completed an unprecedented literary double on Tuesday, winning Britain’s leading nonfiction book prize a decade after being awarded the Booker Prize for fiction.

Flanagan was awarded the 50,000 pound ($63,000) Baillie Gifford Prize for his genre-bending memoir “Question 7,” which combines autobiography, family history and the story of the development of the atomic bomb.

Flanagan won the Booker Prize in 2014 for “The Narrow Road to the Deep North,” a novel that drew on his father’s experiences as a World War II prisoner of the Japanese military.

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.”

Journalist Isabel Hilton, who chaired the judging panel, said Flanagan had written a “meditative symphony of a book” that weaves together “enormous traumatic events of the 20th century … with an extraordinary personal narrative.”

Hilton said Flanagan’s