Helen Garner has won the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction with How to End a Story: Collected Diaries – the first diaries to win the prize.

The Australian writer receives £50,000 for the book, which was described by chair of judges Robbie Millen as a "remarkable, addictive" volume. 

It is the first time that a diary has won in the prize’s 26-year history. This is also the first major UK-based prize win for Garner, who is the recipient of the Australian Society of Authors Medal, the Australia Council Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature, the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize, and the inaugural Melbourne Prize for Literature.

Helen Garner has kept a diary for most of her adult life. Now she is widely recognised as one of the greatest writers of our age. But, of all her books, it is her diaries that she likes best.

Collected for the first time into one volume, these inimitable diaries show Garner like never before: as a fledging author in bohemian Melbourne, publishing her lightning-rod debut novel while raising a young daughter in the 1970s; in the throes of an all-consuming love affair in the 1980s; and clinging to a disintegrating marriage in the 1990s.

How to End a Story reveals the inner life of a woman in love, a mother, a friend and a formidable writer at work. Told with devastating honesty, steel-sharp wit and an ecstatic attention to the details of everyday life, it offers all the satisfactions of a novel alongside the enthralling intimacy of something written in private and just for pleasure.

Millen was joined on the judging panel by historian and author Pratinav Anil, journalist and broadcaster Inaya Folarin Iman, cultural historian, biographer and novelist Lucy Hughes-Hallett, the Economist’s deputy culture editor Rachel Lloyd, and author and biographer Peter Parker.

"After the mysterious alchemy of the judging process, Helen Garner emerged as our unanimous choice," Millen said. "All six judges agreed that How to End a Story, the first diaries to win the Baillie Gifford Prize, is a remarkable, addictive book. Garner takes the diary form, mixing the intimate, the intellectual and the everyday, to new heights. It gives its readers a fascinating insight into the creative reality of a writer’s life – the insecurities, the doubts, the flashes of ego."

Millen added: "It is also a recklessly candid, unsparing, occasionally eye-popping account of the implosion of a marriage. Garner is a brilliant observer and listener – every page has a surprising, sharp or amusing thought. Her collected diaries will surely be mentioned alongside The Diary of Virginia Woolf."

The shortlisted writers will each receive £5,000. This year’s shortlist featured titles including Jason Burke’s The Revolutionists: The Story of the Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970s and Richard Holmes’ The Boundless Deep: Young Tennyson, Science and the Crisis of Belief. To see the full shortlist, visit the LoveReading feature here.

The shortlist was selected from more than 350 books published between 1st November 2024 and 31st October 2025.

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