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2021
Winner
Patch Work: A Life Amongst Clothes by Claire Wilcox
 
Shortlist
Inventory: A River, A City, A Family by Darran Anderson
These Silent Mansions by Jean Sprackland
2020
Winner
A Radical Romance by Alison Light

​Shortlist
Ghostland by Edward Parnell
The Photographer at Sixteen by George Szirtes
​2019
Winner
The Terrible by Yrsa Daley-Ward

Shortlist
The Unmapped Mind by Christian Donlan
Gloucester Crescent by William Miller
2018
​Winner
The Day That Went Missing by Richard Beard

Shortlist
I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes With Death by Maggie O'Farrell
Swimming with Seals by Victoria Whitworth
2017
Winner
The Outrun by Amy Liptrot

Shortlist
All at Sea by Decca Aitkenhead
This Is the Place to Be by Lara Pawson
2016
Winner
Dead Babies and Seaside Towns by Alice Jolly

Shortlist
Pour Me: A Life by AA Gill
Kid Gloves: A Voyage Round My Father by Adam Mars-Jones
2015
Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death and Brain Surgery by Henry Marsh
 
2014
Wave by Sonali Deraniyagala
 
2013
Leaving Alexandria: A Memoir of Faith and Doubt by Richard Holloway
 
2012
How to Disappear by Duncan Fallowell
 
2011
My Father’s Fortune: A Life by Michael Frayn
 
2010
Direct Red by Gabriel Weston
2009
The Three of Us by Julia Blackburn
 
2008
In My Father’s House by Miranda Seymour
 
2007
Keeping Mum by Brian Thompson
 
2006
Untold Stories by Alan Bennett
 
2005
Half An Arch by Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy
 
2004
Clouds of Glory – A Hoxton Childhood by Bryan Magee
 
2003
Stranger on a Train by Jenny Diski
 
2002
Out of India: a Raj Childhood by Michael Foss
 
2001
Bad Blood by Lorna Sage
 
2000
Child of My Time by Mark Frankland
1999
Precious Lives by Margaret Forster
 
1998
True to Both My Selves by Katrin Fitzherbert
 
1997
The Scent of Dried Roses by Tim Lott
 
1996
The Railway Man by Eric Lomax
 
1995
Something in Linoleum by Paul Vaughan
 
1994
And When Did You Last See Your Father? by Blake Morrison
 
1993
More Please by Barry Humphries
 
1992
Almost a Gentleman by John Osborne
 
1991
St Martin’s Ride by Paul Binding
 
1990
Daddy We Hardly Knew You by Germaine Greer
1989
The Grass Arena by John Healy
 
1988
Little Wilson and Big God by Anthony Burgess
 
1987
After a Funeral by Diana Athill
 
1986
Time and Time Again by Dan Jacobson
 
1985
Deceived with Kindness by Angelica Garnett
 
1984
Still Life – Sketches from a Tunbridge Wells Childhood by Richard Cobb
 
1983
Her People by Kathleen Dayus
 
1983
High Path by Ted Walker
 
1982
Shaky Relations by Edward Blishen