The search is underway again for the book that provides the most compelling and enjoyable insight into business issues. The Financial Times and McKinsey & Company have today announced the longlist for the Business Book of the Year Award 2021.

The award, now in its 17th year, is worth £30,000 to the winner, with five further shortlisted authors receiving £10,000 each.

The Longlist:

Unraveled: The Life and Death of a Garment by Maxine Bédat (Portfolio/Penguin Random House) 

The World for Sale: Money, Power and the Traders Who Barter the Earth's Resources by Javier Blas & Jack Farchy (Random House Business UK, Oxford University Press US)

Innovation in Real Places: Strategies for Prosperity in an Unforgiving World by Dan Breznitz (Oxford University Press UK and US)

The Cult of We: WeWork and the Great Start-Up Delusion by Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell (Mudlark/HarperCollins UK, Crown US)

The Key Man: How the Global Elite Was Duped by a Capitalist Fairy Tale by Simon Clark and Will Louch (Penguin Business UK, Harper Business US)

Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgement by Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, Cass R Sunstein (William Collins UK, Little, Brown Spark US)

The Conversation: How Talking Honestly About Racism Can Transform Individuals and Organizations by Robert Livingston (Penguin Business UK, Currency/Crown US)

The New Climate War: The Fight To Take Back Our Planet by Michael E Mann (Scribe UK, PublicAffairs US)

Remote Work Revolution: Succeeding from Anywhere by Tsedal Neeley (Harper Business)

This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race by Nicole Perlroth (Bloomsbury)

Net Positive: How Courageous Companies Thrive by Giving More Than They Take by Paul Polman and Andrew Winston (Harvard Business Review Press)

Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe (Picador UK), Doubleday US)

What We Owe Each Other: A New Social Contract by Minouche Shafik (Bodley Head UK), Princeton US)

The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World by Adrian Wooldridge (Allen Lane UK, Skyhorse US)

A Shot To Save the World: The Inside Story of the Life-or-Death Race for a Covid-19 Vaccine by Gregory Zuckerman (Portfolio)

The shortlist will be announced on 23 September, and the winner will be announced on 1 December.


Last year’s winner was Sarah Frier for No Filter, about the rise of Instagram. Other recent winners include Caroline Criado Perez in 2019, for her exposé of gender bias, Invisible Women, John Carreyrou in 2018 for Bad Blood, about the Theranos scandal, and Amy Goldstein in 2017 for Janesville, about the impact of plant closures on a Wisconsin town.