Samuel Johnson prize 2014 longlist #seanocarolan.com #writing #prize #Johnson

The short-list will be unveiled on the 9th October and the winner will be announced on 4 November.


A few biographies have won the Samuel Johnson prize in years gone by, but the £20,000 award has never in it's 16 year history been won by a memoir.


This year's long-listed titles are as below:


Roy Jenkins: A Well-rounded Life, by John Campbell (Jonathan Cape)

The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life, by John Carey (Faber & Faber)

God's Traitors: Terror and Faith in Elizabethan England, by Jessie Childs (Bodley Head)

The Iceberg: A Memoir, by Marion Coutts (Atlantic)

Hack Attack, by Nick Davies (Random House)

Being Mortal, by Atul Gawande (Profile Books)

The Empire of Necessity, by Greg Grandin, Oneworld

Common People, by Alison Light (Fig Tree)

H is for Hawk, by Helen Macdonald (Jonathan Cape)

Do No Harm, by Henry Marsh (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)

An Encyclopaedia of Myself, by Jonathan Meades (4th Estate)

Village of Secrets: Defying the Nazis in Vichy France, by Caroline Moorehead(Chatto & Windus)

The Mighty Dead: Why Homer Matters, by Adam Nicolson, (William Collins)

In These Times, by Jenny Uglow (Faber & Faber)

Romany and Tom: A Memoir, by Ben Watt (Bloomsbury)