23/08/2026
Helen Garner (Ford, The Hermitage ’60) won the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction in November for her collected diaries, How to End a Story: Collected Diaries 1978–1998 (Text Publishing, 2025). It is the first time a collection of diaries has won the prestigious award, which is worth $100,000.
“I never dreamt my book would win a prize of any kind because it seemed to fall between the cracks of the types of books people consider prizeworthy,” Helen said.
Chair of judges, Robbie Millen, described How to End a Story as “a remarkable, addictive book”, revealing it was the judges’ unanimous choice. “Garner takes the diary form, mixing the intimate, the intellectual and the everyday, to new heights,” he said. “Garner is a brilliant observer and listener – every page has a surprising, sharp or amusing thought. Her collected diaries will surely be mentioned alongside The Diary of Virginia Woolf.”
Helen received the inaugural Melbourne Prize for Literature in 2006, won the Windham Campbell Prize for non-fiction in 2016 and was honoured with the Australia Council Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature in 2019. Her books include Monkey Grip (McPhee Gribble, 1977), The Children’s Bach (McPhee Gribble, 1984), The First Stone (Picador, 1995), The Spare Room (Text, 2008), This House of Grief (Text, 2014), and The Season (Text, 2024). More recently, she co-authored The Mushroom Tapes: Conversations on a Triple Murder Trial (Text, 2025) about the Erin Patterson murder trial with Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein.
Helen initially published her diaries in three volumes: Yellow Notebook: Diaries Volume I 1978–1987 (2019), One Day I'll Remember This: Diaries 1987–1995 (2020) and How To End A Story: Diaries 1995–1998 (2021). The collected diaries, now published together, span 20 years and offer remarkable insights into the author’s writing process and her personal life. “In a sense I never expected anyone else would read it, let alone it would become a book people would consider for a prize,” she said.
