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Helen Garner’s diaries win 2025 Baillie Gifford prize for nonfiction

Tracing the author’s life from bohemian Melbourne in the 70s to the breakdown of her marriage in the 90s, How to End a Story was praised by judges for ‘taking the diary form to new heights’

Australian author Helen Garner has been named the winner of the 2025 Baillie Gifford prize for nonfiction for How to End a Story, becoming the first writer to win the prestigious award with a collection of diaries.

The announcement of the £50,000 award was made on Tuesday evening at a ceremony in London. Robbie Millen, chair of judges and the literary editor of the Times, described Garner’s collection as “a remarkable, addictive book,” and said the decision had been unanimous among the six judges. “Garner takes the diary form – mixing the intimate, the intellectual, and the everyday – to new heights.”

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Alan Hollinghurst wins David Cohen lifetime award for ‘pioneering’ novels

Author says he is ‘overcome with emotion’ after winning £40,000 honour for books including The Line of Beauty and The Swimming-Pool Library

Alan Hollinghurst has been awarded the 2025 David Cohen prize for literature, one of the UK and Ireland’s most prestigious literary honours, in recognition of his lifetime’s achievement in fiction.

The prize, worth £40,000, was announced on Tuesday evening in London by the chair of judges Hermione Lee. She described Hollinghurst as “one of the most daring, stylish, witty, humane and influential novelists writing in the English language today”.

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Tom’s Crossing by Mark Z Danielewski – House of Leaves author returns with a 1200-page western

A quarter century after that landmark cult novel, this new epic has aspects of brilliance but seems designed for academic study rather than readerly enjoyment

In this moment of cultural panic about the decline of reading, it takes an enviable confidence to deliver a volume such as Tom’s Crossing. Weighing in at more than 1,200 pages of closely printed text, the novel contains, I would hazard, about half a million words – roughly two Ulysses. It’s also, for that matter, about twice the length of Danielewski’s debut, House of Leaves, which secured cult status for its author on publication 25 years ago. Tom’s Crossing is so big that when I got it out on the tube, I felt like that character on Trigger Happy TV with his enormous mobile phone. “Look,” I seemed to be telling the passengers scrolling Instagram on their devices, “I’m reading a book!”

The novel is not merely long, it’s also a challenging, deliberately arcane work that insists on its own epic status, yet has at its heart a straightforward and compelling story. Kalin March, a 16-year-old nerdy outsider in the town of Orvop in Utah, is a preternaturally talented horse rider. Through a shared love of horses, he strikes up an unlikely friendship with handsome and popular Tom Gatestone.

“Earlier that afternoon, when for some reason Allison’s thoughts had angrily returned to the curse she’d laid upon Kalin before he’d left, warnin him from guns, makin it clear by insubstantial decree that even handlin a gun might cost him the horses he loved, and for the rest of his life, she and Sondra had returned to the Isatch Canyon parkin lot, where they’d promptly learned about the great rockfall.”

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Book of Lives by Margaret Atwood review – the great novelist reveals her hidden side

A sharp, funny and engaging autobiography from one of the towering literary figures of our age

Margaret Atwood didn’t want to write a literary memoir. She worried it would be boring – “I wrote a book, I wrote a second book, I wrote another book …” Alcoholic excess, debauched parties and sexual transgressions would have perked things up, but she hasn’t lived that way.

In the end what she has written is less a memoir than an autobiography, not a slice of life but the whole works, 85 years. Where most such backward looks are cosily triumphalist or anxiously self-justifying, hers is sharp, funny and engaging, a book you can warm to even if you’re not fully au fait (and few people are) with her astonishing output, which in the “also by” contents list here fills two pages.

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So you want to try psychotherapy. But what does it actually do?

From psychoanalysis to existential therapy, there’s a bewildering variety of approaches – with one thing in common

Sam came into psychotherapy during a difficult period at work. He had started to feel as if he was stagnating in his role and it was getting him down. As he approached midlife he had reached a level of seniority that he had sought for years, but now he was starting to wonder whether this was it. He wasn’t sure exactly what the matter was: he didn’t feel especially depressed, just somehow stuck. It had taken him a long time to consider speaking to someone – what could they really do, in the absence of an obvious psychological disorder?

Psychotherapy occupies an increasingly central place in our culture. Just as we have become inclined to understand our struggles and our sadness under the heading of “mental health”, so too we have placed ever greater authority on psychotherapists to help us understand how we should deal with the problems life throws up. Even those without diagnoses of depression, anxiety or obsessive compulsive disorder increasingly seek therapeutic support, with a recent survey finding that around a third of the population have done so.

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‘It’s not just a book, it’s a window to my soul’: why we’re in love with literary angst

Why did an obscure Dostoevsky novella sell 100,000 copies in the UK last year? And why are TikTokers raving about a 1943 Turkish novel? The way young people are discovering books is changing – and their literary tastes reflect our times

The sales patterns for classic novels are normally a fairly predictable business. “Every year it’s the same authors,” says Jessica Harrison, publishing director for Penguin Classics UK. “Austen is always at the very top, and then all the school ones: Orwell, An Inspector Calls, Of Mice and Men, Jane Eyre.”

But last year it was different. Penguin’s bestselling classic by far was a little-known novella by Fyodor Dostoevsky. White Nights sold more than 100,000 copies in the UK in 2024. It is an angsty story of impossible love, run through with characteristic Dostoevskian gloom. A young man and woman meet on a bridge in St Petersburg on consecutive nights: his love for her is unrequited; she is despairing because the man she really loves has ghosted her. The pleasure the young man takes in her company is shadowed by the knowledge that it can never be permanent.

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What did Pasolini know? Fifty years after his brutal murder, the director’s vision of fascism is more urgent than ever

With mystery still surrounding Pier Paolo Pasolini’s death, the poet and film-maker’s warnings of corruption and rising totalitarianism offer a chilling message for our times

Pier Paolo Pasolini was murdered at around midnight on 2 November 1975. His blood-soaked body was found the next morning on waste ground in Ostia, on the outskirts of Rome, battered so badly the famous face was almost unrecognisable. Italy’s premier intellectual, artist, provocateur, national conscience, homosexual, dead at the age of 53, his scandalous final film still in the editing suite. “Assassinato Pasolini,” the next morning’s papers announced, alongside photographs of the 17-year-old accused of his murder. Everyone knew his taste for working-class hustlers. A hookup gone wrong was the instant verdict.

Some deaths are so suggestive that they become emblematic of a subject, the deceiving lens through which an entire life is forever after read. In this weirdly totalitarian mode of interpretation, Virginia Woolf is always walking towards the Ouse, the river in which she drowned herself. Likewise, Pasolini’s entire body of work is coloured by the seeming fact that he was murdered by a rent boy, the crowning act of a relentlessly high-risk life.

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What we’re reading: writers and readers on the books they enjoyed in October

Writers and Guardian readers discuss the titles they have read over the last month. Join the conversation in the comments

Erik Satie Three Piece Suite by Ian Penman is a daring and endlessly inventive portrait of the iconoclastic composer. Penman’s skill lies in his total disregard for tired cliches and tropes of music criticism, while perfectly combining the highbrow and the lowbrow – a digression on Les Dawson shows why he might just be our greatest writer on music.

Cursed Daughters by Oyinkan Braithwaite is published by Atlantic (£18.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

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