Edmund Richardson’s Biography of Alexander the Great Wins Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction

London: An “immersive” biography of Alexander the Great won the prestigious Baillie Gifford Prize for nonfiction on Wednesday, in the latest sign of booming public interest in the world of ancient Greece.

Edmund Richardson’s “Alexander: God, King, Man” was named winner of the £50,000 ($67,000) award at a ceremony in London.

British journalist Kirsty Lang, who chaired the judging panel, said the book was the first work of ancient history to win the prize and “reads like a novel.”

“It’s very immersive. You really feel that you’re there on the battlefield, marching across Central Asia and Egypt with Alexander,” she said, adding that the book “contains a lot of new research,” including Richardson’s own translations of sources from 12 ancient languages.

A Decade of Research

Richardson, a professor of classics at Durham University in England, spent a decade — “far too long, down far too many rabbit holes,” as he put it — researching the life of Alexander, who inherited a debt-ridden Macedonian kingdom at the age of 20, conquered territory stretching from Greece to India, and died at 32.

“No one called him Alexander the Great in his lifetime,” Richardson told The Associated Press. “No one thought he was going to conquer the world. He was his father’s slightly disappointing son, even when he took the throne. He was a tributary, not the main event. And then he starts to do all of these astonishing things.”

Richardson said Alexander’s military expedition “transforms reality more profoundly than almost any other event in human history.”

“It connects the world up in ways that it has never been connected before,” he said. “It results in this flood of knowledge and understanding and ideas and religious belief and science and astronomy and art, crossing from Babylon to Greece, from Greece to modern-day Afghanistan, from Egypt across to Italy.”

“A Love Letter to the Humanities”

The judges described the book as “a love letter to the humanities and the work of historians and archaeologists,” at a time when those disciplines face mounting pressure from university funding cuts in the United Kingdom and elsewhere.

Lang said the book should appeal to fans of Christopher Nolan’s epic film adaptation of “The Odyssey,” which has helped fuel a surge of popular interest in the ancient Greek classics.

“They knew to tell great stories,” she said. “Life, death, love, relationships, tragedy. They speak to the most basic of human emotions and motivations.”

A Strong Field of Finalists

Founded in 1999, the Baillie Gifford Prize recognises English-language books in current affairs, history, politics, science, sport, travel, biography, autobiography and the arts, and has been credited with bringing an eclectic range of fact-based works to a wider readership.

The winning title was selected from more than 350 entries and beat five other finalists, including American journalist Patrick Radden Keefe’s bestseller “London Falling,” the true story of a teenager who died after becoming caught up in the shadowy world of London’s super-rich.

The other shortlisted books were Nicholas Boggs’ James Baldwin biography “Baldwin: A Love Story”; Matthew Sweet’s life of romance novelist Barbara Cartland, “The Great Dictator”; Anand Gopal’s Syrian saga “Days of Love and Rage”; and Andrea Wulf’s “The Traveler,” about the 18th-century naturalist and explorer George Forster.

Last year’s prize was awarded to Australian writer Helen Garner for her collected diaries, “How to End a Story.”