Edmund Richardson has been awarded the £50,000 Baillie Gifford prize for non-fiction, a milestone achievement for his exhaustive and intimate biography, Alexander: God, King, Man. The accolade arrives as public interest in the ancient ruler remains high, underscored by the recent box-office success of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. Richardson, a professor of classics whose work has been characterized by critics as part novel and part history, spent a decade retracing the footsteps of the Macedonian king from the British Museum’s archives to the distant foothills of the Himalayas. H e was the most powerful man in the world but he was brought down by one battle too many after a decade at the top. According to the story of Alexander the Great might be more than 2,000 years old, but it seems timely that a new biography of the ancient ruler won the Baillie Gifford prize for nonfiction just as President Trump took a battering in the US midterms. “This is a moment,”, Its author Edmund Richardson, “where people are finding that there are limits to what unlimited wealth and power can do, and that humanity catches up with. Alexander wants to transform the world – and he leaves it in ruins.”. Purple scarf and matching socks, with a high forehead and corona of auburn curls, Richardson himself might have stepped out of an earlier age, wearing a purple velvet jacket. It is hard to imagine anyone less like history’s favourite mob boss than this softly spoken professor of classics. The view of the City of London skyline from the floor to ceiling windows a reminder of 21st-century power and economics, we are having coffee at the offices of the PR company for the Baillie Gifford prize. It would, we agree, have made the perfect backdrop for an interview with Patrick Radden Keefe, a previous winner of the £50,000 Baillie Gifford prize and the favourite this year for London Falling, a forensic investigation into the death of a teenager who falls from one of the city’s luxury skyscrapers. “I would never, ever have imagined this,” Richardson says, almost in a whisper. “I am fully expecting someone to. Tap me on the shoulder and say, ‘I’m so sorry, there’s been a terrible mistake, Mr Radden Keefe is waiting. Like many, Richardson first encountered the figure in the pages of Alexander, Mary Renault’s 1969 fictional trilogy, when he was a boy. Even by ancient standards, with his empire unravelling before his death, but for Richardson its true legacy is in the “ripple effects” that we still feel today. “It’s in, his expansionist campaigns might have been brutal. There have been countless takes on Alexander’s story: the boy from the Macedon hills, who became king aged 20 in 336BC after his father was assassinated; marched his army into the hea, from Plutarch to Horrible Histories. Richardson doesn’t just make the ruler of the ancient Greek kingdom of Macedon flesh and blood for a new generation. It’s in the world becoming far more connected. There have been countless takes on Alexander’s story: the boy from the Macedon hills, who became king aged 20 in 336BC after his father was assassinated; marched his army into the heart of the Persian empire; had conquered much of the known world by the time he was 30, killing 1% of the population along the way; and who died “brokenhearted” in Babylon aged 32, from Plutarch to Horrible Histories. He was horrified. “The idea of coming up against Alexander, and all of these thousands of versions of his story written by some of the people I admire the most in the world – absolute terror!”, but when his editor suggested he write about Alexander himself. But his travels back in time were interrupted by modern-day unrest. “There was a short encounter with a barricade of burning tyres,” he says, referring to a protest he stumbled upon in Cairo, while his visit to Afghanist. He had been struggling with the ending (“Obviously everyone dies and everything goes wrong”) but he returned to his “tangled” manuscript with “a feeling of trying to find a ray of hope where the light seemed to have gone. Computer simulation and new discoveries gave him access to evidence and contemporary sources unavailable to earlier historians. He wasn’t even sure if he would finish it.
Reflecting on the challenges of his subject, Richardson noted the heavy toll the biography took on him, jokingly referencing the cautionary tale of Callisthenes, Aristotle’s great-nephew and Alexander’s first biographer, who was reportedly crucified. The author described the book as a beautiful monster to write, acknowledging the personal difficulties he faced during the process, including a serious health battle. Around three years ago, Richardson was diagnosed with cancer, a condition he has managed since his teenage years. Writing the biography became an uncertain journey, as he questioned whether he would be alive to see its publication. He was barely 40. “I was writing this book not knowing if I would be around when it was out in the world,” he says, at this point.
His resilience was further tested last year when he was hospitalized following a collapse attributed to exhaustion and stress. He recounted a surreal moment in the hospital ward, where he found himself surrounded by hieroglyphs and his laptop while other patients were under police guard. This experience served as a turning point for the 44-year-old academic, who grew up in Bristol as the child of an American mathematician and an English-Irish art historian. Having studied at Cambridge under Mary Beard and later at Princeton, Richardson attributes much of his perspective to his fiancee, Yepoka, whom he credits for helping him see the wonder of the world. As a historian, vividly, i felt my own fallibility as a writer. He also had to confront his own mortality.
Richardson’s academic career has historically focused on obscure figures, most notably in his previous work, Alexandria: The Quest for the Lost City, which chronicled the life of the 19th-century archaeologist Charles Masson.
Transitioning to a figure as monumental as Alexander the Great was an intentional shift toward a story of impossible scale.
He contends that Alexander reshaped reality more profoundly than almost anyone else in history, leaving behind legacy ripples in science and culture that persist into the 21st century.
Despite the brutality of the Macedonian empire, Richardson highlights the ruler’s capacity for both extreme cruelty and profound kindness.
The prize win marks the conclusion of a long, arduous process that the author admits had difficult times, making his eventual success feel like a transition into the light. Now, he looks toward his next project: a book about the British Egyptologist Flinders Petrie. Richardson remains enthusiastic about the power of historical inquiry to connect modern readers with the distant past, viewing his research as a way to inhabit the fragments and ghosts of history. As he prepares for further media appearances to discuss his winning work, he expresses genuine surprise and humility at the public’s eagerness to engage with his academic research.
