Helen Garner, an acclaimed Australian creator and diarist whose movie star followers embody singer Dua Lipa and fellow author David Nicholls, stated that diaries, usually written by ladies, tended to be given “short shrift” within the literary trade.
She has now received the Baillie Gifford award for How To Finish A Story, a set which charts 20 years of her life, from publishing her debut novel whereas elevating a younger daughter within the Seventies to the disintegration of her marriage within the Nineties.
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Garner accepted the award through video hyperlink from Australia. Pic: Baillie Gifford Prize
Judges hailed her as a “brilliant observer and listener” and described the diaries as a “recklessly candid, unsparing, occasionally eye-popping account of the implosion of a marriage”.
“Because they were often written by women, they used to be dismissed as just sort of verbal sludge that people… sort of lazily wrote down, but in actual fact to keep a decent diary involves as much hard work as writing a full-on book – in my experience, anyway. So I’m really glad that it’s been recognised.”
Garner was named winner of the £50,000 prize at a ceremony in London on Tuesday, and accepted her award through video hyperlink from Melbourne, Australia.
Journalist Robbie Millen, who chaired the prize jury, stated her “addictive” ebook was the unanimous alternative of the six judges.
“Garner takes the diary form, mixing the intimate, the intellectual, and the everyday, to new heights,” he stated, evaluating her to Virginia Woolf within the canon of nice literary diarists. “There are places it’s toe-curlingly embarrassing. She puts it all out there.”
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How To Finish A Story was the decide’s unanimous alternative. Pic: Baillie Gifford Prize
‘The mess my life turned will not be distinctive’
“People have said to me, ‘this could be my marriage’,” she stated. “I found that rather shocking because it’s quite a painful story of a marriage collapsing, starting off with love, but then developing over the years into something painful and destructive.
“I have been glad to seek out that I am not distinctive in that means, that the mess that I made in my life, the mess that my life turned, it is not distinctive. In truth, it is archetypal. It is one thing that is occurred to gazillions of individuals within the historical past of the world.”
Asked by Ridge if the book would have been a “tough learn” for her ex-husband, Garner replied: “I do not know, I have never spoken to him for roughly 25 years. We cannot be talking to one another once more, I think about. And in the event you’ve learn the diary, you may see why.”
The opposite shortlisted titles
Jason Burke’s The Revolutionists: The Story Of The Extremists Who Hijacked The Seventies
Richard Holmes’s The Boundless Deep: Younger Tennyson, Science And The Disaster Of Perception
Justin Marozzi’s Captives And Companions: A Historical past Of Slavery And The Slave Commerce In The Islamic World
Adam Weymouth’s Lone Wolf: Strolling The Faultlines Of Europe
Frances Wilson’s Electrical Spark: The Enigma Of Muriel Spark
How To Finish A Story is the primary set of diaries to win the Baillie Gifford Prize, which was based in 1999 and recognises English-language books in present affairs, historical past, politics, science, sport, journey, biography, autobiography and the humanities.
It was chosen from greater than 350 books printed between 1 November 2024 and 31 October 2025.
