Booker-winner Flanagan takes Baillie Gifford nonfiction prize

Richard Flanagan's Question 7 has been named winner of the Baillie Gifford prize for nonfiction, making the Australian writer the first person to have won both this award and the Booker prize for fiction.

- Lucy Knight

Part memoir, part novel, part history, Question 7 charts Flanagan's attempt to understand his parents and Tasmania, where he is from. It is "just a remarkable book," said the chair of judges, journalist Isabel Hilton, describing it as "an astonishingly accomplished meditation on memory, history, trauma, love and death - and an intricately woven exploration of the chains of consequence that frame a life".

Flanagan was unable to attend the London ceremony to collect the £50,000 prize in person, as he is currently on a trek in the Tasmanian rainforest. He delivered his acceptance speech via a pre-recorded video.