Awards & arts prize winners – quick links
British Academy Book Prize: 2025 Shortlist
Founded in 2013, the British Academy Book Prize rewards works of non-fiction that deepen our understanding of people, societies and cultures and their interactions across time and place.
The six shortlisted books for this year’s £25,000 British Academy Book Prize are Africonomics: A History of Western Ignorance by Dr Bronwen Everill; The Baton and the Cross: Russia’s Church from Pagans to Putin by Lucy Ash; The Burning Earth: An Environmental History of the Last 500 Years by Professor Sunil Amrith FBA; Sick of It: The Fight for Women’s Health by Professor Sophie Harman; Sound Tracks: A Musical Detective Story by Dr Graeme Lawson; and The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World by William Dalrymple.
The winner will be announced at a British Academy Book Prize Ceremony in October.
Comedy Women in Print Long List
Comedy Women in Print (CWIP) is the UK and Ireland’s first literary prize dedicated to celebrating witty women’s writing, and the brainchild of comedian, author, and actress Helen Lederer. It recognises, celebrates, and encourages witty women authors, both established writers and those aspiring to the craft, with awards including a publishing deal for a new writer.
There are three categories for novels that are published, unpublished and self-published, each with its own team of (women) judges.
See full details of the longlist here; the shortlist will be out later in the month.
The Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction
The Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction covers books across current affairs, history, politics, science, sport, travel, biography and autobiography, and the arts, and the winning author receives a prize of £50,000, with five shortlisted authors each receiving £5,000. The international longlist is available on the Prize website.
The shortlist will be announced on 2 October and the winner will be revealed on 4 November.
Photo Oxford Open Call Winners
The biennial photographic festival Photo Oxford returns for its fifth edition this year around the theme of ‘Truth’. Entrants in the Photo Oxford 2025 Open Call competition were asked to address the complex challenge of ‘revealing truth’. The winning entry, Stolen Spring – Confronting the realities of war in Ukraine, is by Alena Grom, a Ukrainian artist and documentary photographer. Chosen by the judges from a vast field of entries, the work captures the spirit of the moment and the photographer’s truth of the world as they see it.
The other nine finalists were Chrystel Mukeba for I’ve Never Seen my Father Cry; Gloria Oyarzabal for Usus Fructus Abusus (La Blanche et la noire) 3000ppp; Henri Kisielewski for Non Fiction; Joel Jimenez Jara for The River is a Loom – The Thread is a Mountain; Maryam Saeedpoor for Angel Unveiled; Murray Ballard for Ghosts in the Field; Nikita Teryoshin for Nothing Personal – The Back Office of War; Silvy Crespo for The Elephant’s Foot; and Tianqiutao Chen for Seen Unseen – The Migrant Children. You can see the works in a free exhibition at Modern Art Oxford.
The Photo Oxford Open Call Winners’ Exhibition is on at Modern Art Oxford to 5 October 2025.
Self-Portrait Prize 2025
The Self-Portrait Prize is a biennial art prize that promotes and celebrates the practice of self-portraiture and is the only national art prize to focus exclusively on the genre. A panel of judges selects the winner of the £10,000 Ruth Borchard Prize and curates an exhibition featuring a range of distinguished entries.
This year’s prize winner is Iranian artist Hanieh Yavari for her photograph Squeezed by Shades, an inkjet print on fine art paper, from the Brutal Resilience Series 2023. Yavari says powerfully of the work: ‘The concrete environment, with its harsh textures, symbolises entrapment, challenging the forces of control and subjugation. In this way, I whisper my resistance.’
An exhibition of the long-listed artworks, including the winning entry, is available for viewing online via on Vortic and Artsy and on the website to 7 January 2026.
New Residency at The King’s Gallery, Edinburgh
Two Edinburgh-based artists, Phoebe Leach and Dette Allmark, have been selected for the first residency at The King’s Gallery in the Palace of Holyroodhouse. This new residency is a collaboration between the Royal Collection Trust and the Edinburgh College of Art. It has been launched to celebrate the exhibition Drawing the Italian Renaissance that will be shown at The King’s Gallery. This is the most significant display of Italian Renaissance drawings to be shown in Scotland for over 50 years and includes works by Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Titian.
Leach and Allmark will work in the Gallery, responding to the masterpieces in the exhibition, with their pieces forming a changing and vibrant display for visitors. The residency programme was developed to show that drawing remains a vital practice for artists today, just as it was for the artists of the Italian Renaissance.
Drawing the Italian Renaissance will be at The King’s Gallery, Palace of Holyroodhouse, Edinburgh, from 17 October 2025–1 March 2026.
RPS International Photography Exhibition 166
The world’s longest-running exhibition for contemporary photography is open to photographers and image-makers of all ages. This year’s submissions focus on topical themes including environmental issues, identity, community, family, and culture to show photographers can engage with the world in ways that are visually compelling as well as socially and culturally significant.
Lydia Goldblatt and Keerthana Kunnath are this year’s major award recipients. Lydia Goldblatt receives the IPE Award for her series Fugue which explores motherhood as a central theme, considering love and grief, mothering and losing a mother, as well as intimacy and distance.
The Under 30s Award went to Keerthana Kunnath for Not What You Saw a series highlighting South Indian female bodybuilders who challenge entrenched gender and beauty norms by embracing physical strength, a trait often considered to be masculine. The IPE exhibition, featuring works by 51 photographers, is on now at Saatchi Gallery.
IPE 166 is in Galleries 1 & 2 at Saatchi, Sloane Square, to 20 September 2025.
