Helen Garner has been shortlisted for the prestigious Baillie Gifford Prize for non-fiction, worth 50,000 British pounds ($101,000), for her collected diaries: How to End a Story.<\/p>\n
The diaries span 20 years, from 1978 to 1998, and chart much of the celebrated Australian author’s career and personal life, including the aftermath of the release of her semi-autobiographical first novel, Monkey Grip (1977).<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
When her first book came out, Helen Garner was criticised for simply publishing her diaries. She denied it, until 2002, when she said: “I’m too old to bother with that crap any more.” (Supplied: Darren James)<\/p>\n
How to End a Story offers an insight into Garner’s writing process, including her eye for beautiful, sometimes troubling, often absurdly funny details, while at the same time offering an unflinching look at painful moments in her life.<\/p>\n
Those moments include the backlash to the publication of The First Stone (1995), about a sexual harassment case at an Australian university; and her affair, marriage and break-up from fellow writer Murray Bail.<\/p>\n
The Baillie Gifford judges \u2014 chaired by literary editor Robbie Millen \u2014 described How to End a Story as “candid [and] pacey”.<\/p>\n
“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 said.<\/p>\n
Speaking to ABC Arts last year<\/a>, American author Leslie Jamison \u2014 who wrote an introduction to the US release of How to End a Story \u2014 said she loved how Garner’s diaries reckon with “the anxiety that telling more personal or domestic stories doesn’t matter as much”.<\/p>\n The 2025 Baillie Gifford Prize shortlistThe Revolutionists: The Story of the Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970s by Jason BurkeHow to End a Story: Collected Diaries by Helen GarnerThe Boundless Deep: Young Tennyson, Science and the Crisis of Belief by Richard HolmesCaptives and Companions: A History of Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Islamic World by Justin MarozziLone Wolf: Walking the Faultlines of Europe by Adam WeymouthElectric Spark: The Enigma of Muriel Spark by Frances Wilson<\/p>\n “The same person who wrote The Children’s Bach wrote This House of Grief,” she said.<\/p>\n “One can pay attention to the everyday and the ordinary and find profound truth there, and also pay attention to the extraordinary or the dramatic or the newsworthy and find a great truth there.”<\/p>\n The Baillie Gifford Prize is an annual award for non-fiction books published in English in the UK in the preceding year.<\/p>\n The rest of the shortlist features five British authors, including two past finalists, whose works also explore the writing life: Frances Wilson, for her biography of author Muriel Spark; and Richard Holmes, for his biography of Alfred Lord Tennyson as a young poet.<\/p>\n It is the third year in a row that an Australian writer has been shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford, after historian Christopher Clark in 2023, and Richard Flanagan, who won last year’s prize for Question 7.<\/p>\n Finding an international audience at 82<\/p>\n Speaking of the prize in September<\/a>, Garner said she was “bewildered” to even be longlisted. “How do they even know I exist?”<\/p>\n “Everything I’ve ever written has been very close to my personal experience and to my life, at various distances,” Garner told The Book Show. (Supplied: Text)<\/p>\n She told them about her approach to writing in her diary: “I am trying to write as well as I can, to make my sentences clean and springy, and never to bore myself.”<\/p>\n While she cut repetitions, irrelevant musings, and things that would “pointlessly hurt” people from the book, she wanted to “be as brazen about my own experiences as I could stand”.<\/p>\n “This turns out to be one of the things that readers tell me they like about the diaries,” she said.\u00a0<\/p>\n “It’s a way of connecting with strangers. The opposite of loneliness.”<\/p>\n Garner told ABC Radio National’s The Book Show in 2020<\/a>, as the second volume One Day I’ll Remember This was released in Australia, she didn’t want to ask people’s permission to publish sections of the diaries.<\/p>\n Listen to Helen Garner on The Book Show in 2020<\/a><\/p>\n Instead, she offered to show people close to her the passages about them. Only one person took up the offer, the others saying: “Go right ahead, I trust you.”<\/p>\n “That was a wonderful thing for me,” Garner says.<\/p>\n “I think there are some people who would be pretty unhappy about having appeared in it, but somehow I feel alright about that. I don’t feel I’ve ratted on anybody.”<\/p>\n Garner becoming a Baillie Gifford finalist at 82 is further proof the international literary community is in the midst of a decade-long rediscovery of her oeuvre.<\/p>\n The cover of the forthcoming Australian edition of How to End a Story: Collected Diaries 1978-1998. (Supplied: Text)<\/p>\n In 2016, she won the $US150,000 ($200,000) Windham Campbell Prize for non-fiction <\/a>for her body of work; and in 2023, her novel The Children’s Bach (1984) and non-fiction book This House of Grief (2014) were released in the US for the first time.<\/p>\n This year, This House of Grief, about the murder trial of Robert Farquharson, was the monthly read of British pop star Dua Lipa’s wildly popular book club<\/a>, while Sarah Jessica Parker’s Carrie Bradshaw was spotted reading the same book in the final season of And Just Like That\u2026<\/p>\n First published in Australia in three separate volumes, the full collection How to End a Story will be released by Garner’s local publisher, Text Publishing, in November.<\/p>\n Garner’s most recent book is The Season<\/a>, a “tender portrait of masculinity” about her grandson’s AFL team, while her book about the “mushroom murder trial”<\/a>, with fellow writers Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein, is due out next month.<\/p>\n A controversial sponsor<\/p>\n Last year, fellow Australian author Richard Flanagan refused to accept the prize money<\/a> until sponsor Baillie Gifford put forward a plan to reduce its investment in fossil fuels and increase investment in renewable energy.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n