'The mess my life became is not unique': Diary collection wins prestigious non-fiction prize

A writer, whose "candid" and "unsparing" diaries person go the archetypal to ever triumph the prestigious Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction. has told Sky News she is "delighted" to spot the literate format recognised alternatively than dismissed.

Helen Garner, an acclaimed Australian writer and diarist whose personage fans see vocalist Dua Lipa and chap writer David Nicholls, said that diaries, often written by women, tended to beryllium fixed "short shrift" successful the literate industry.

She has present won the Baillie Gifford grant for How To End A Story, a postulation which charts 20 years of her life, from publishing her debut caller portion raising a young girl successful the 1970s to the disintegration of her matrimony successful the 1990s.

Judges hailed her arsenic a "brilliant perceiver and listener" and described the diaries arsenic a "recklessly candid, unsparing, occasionally eye-popping relationship of the implosion of a marriage".

Speaking to Sky News' Sophy Ridge and Wilfred Frost on the caller Mornings with Ridge and Frost programme, Garner, 82, said: "My main crushed to beryllium delighted is that I deliberation diaries person been fixed abbreviated shrift successful literature. I deliberation they are literature.

"Because they were often written by women, they utilized to beryllium dismissed arsenic conscionable benignant of verbal sludge that people... benignant of lazily wrote down, but successful existent information to support a decent diary involves arsenic overmuch hard enactment arsenic penning a full-on publication - successful my experience, anyway. So I'm truly gladsome that it's been recognised."

Garner was named victor of the £50,000 prize astatine a ceremonial successful London connected Tuesday, and accepted her grant via video nexus from Melbourne, Australia.

Journalist Robbie Millen, who chaired the prize jury, said her "addictive" publication was the unanimous prime of the six judges.

"Garner takes the diary form, mixing the intimate, the intellectual, and the everyday, to caller heights," helium said, comparing her to Virginia Woolf successful the canon of large literate diarists. "There are places it's toe-curlingly embarrassing. She puts it each retired there."

'The messiness my beingness became is not unique'

Garner, who has published novels, abbreviated stories, screenplays and existent transgression books, told Sky News she has been amazed to perceive from truthful galore readers who person related to her words and astir intimate thoughts.

"People person said to me, 'this could beryllium my marriage'," she said. "I recovered that alternatively shocking due to the fact that it's rather a achy communicative of a matrimony collapsing, starting disconnected with love, but past processing implicit the years into thing achy and destructive.

"I've been gladsome to find that I'm not unsocial successful that way, that the messiness that I made successful my life, the messiness that my beingness became, it's not unique. In fact, it's archetypal. It's thing that's happened to gazillions of radical successful the past of the world."

Asked by Ridge if the publication would person been a "difficult read" for her ex-husband, Garner replied: "I don't know, I haven't spoken to him for astir 25 years. We won't beryllium speaking to each different again, I imagine. And if you've work the diary, you'll spot why."

How To End A Story is the archetypal acceptable of diaries to triumph the Baillie Gifford Prize, which was founded successful 1999 and recognises English-language books successful existent affairs, history, politics, science, sport, travel, biography, autobiography and the arts.

It was selected from much than 350 books published betwixt 1 November 2024 and 31 October 2025.