Alexander the Great Biography Wins the 2026 Baillie Gifford Prize

Edmund Richardson’s Alexander: God, King, Man is the first book about ancient history to win the £50,000 nonfiction award.

Edmund Richardson won the 2026 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction for Alexander: God, King, Man, his biography of Alexander the Great. Judging chair Kirsty Lang announced the winner on November 4 at BMA House in London. The £50,000 award went to a book about ancient history for the first time since the prize began in 1999 as the Samuel Johnson Prize.

Why the judges chose Alexander: God, King, Man

Lang singled out the book’s pace and the way Richardson uses recent archaeological discoveries and new technology to reconstruct Alexander’s world. Richardson, a professor in Durham University’s Department of Classics and Ancient History, spent more than a decade researching the biography. The project took him across four continents and drew on new translations of sources in 12 ancient languages.

The opening gives a sense of what that research makes possible. Richardson begins with Babylonian astronomers watching the sky on November 5, 333 BCE, hundreds of miles from Alexander, just hours before his first battle against the Persian king. The choice lets readers enter the story through people who were already observing and recording their own world before Alexander’s army reached them. It’s a good reason to try the opening if you usually reach for historical fiction and want to see how a historian builds a scene from ancient evidence.

What is the winning Alexander the Great biography about?

Richardson follows Alexander from his accession to the Macedonian throne at 20 through the campaigns that carried him as far as the Indian subcontinent and to his death in Babylon at 32. The title captures the different roles he came to occupy in that brief span. He inherited a kingdom in debt, built an empire through conquest, and came to be worshipped as a living god. Starting with a young king whose future was uncertain gives those later transformations room to surprise.

St. Martin’s Press published the U.S. hardcover on September 29, 2026. Macmillan’s listing includes an excerpt and identifies the 480-page edition by ISBN 9781250285614.

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Find Edmund Richardson’s Alexander: God, King, Man on Amazon

What else was shortlisted for the 2026 Baillie Gifford Prize?

The judges considered more than 350 eligible books. The other finalists were Nicholas Boggs’s Baldwin: A Love Story, Anand Gopal’s Days of Love and Rage, Patrick Radden Keefe’s London Falling, Matthew Sweet’s The Great Dictator, and Andrea Wulf’s The Traveller.

Read our guide to all six Baillie Gifford Prize finalists for more on the contenders. If Richardson’s biography sends you looking for more books set in or about his world, start with our reading list on ancient Greece.

Follow us on Instagram and Facebook