BA Book Prize reading list: Ed Conway’s picks
Posted by Ed Conway
To celebrate this year’s British Academy Book Prize, we’ve asked all of the shortlisted authors to tell us about the books they’ve been reading. We’ll be revealing their choices over the next two weeks, in the run up to the winner’s announcement on 22 October. First up, we hear from Ed Conway, author of Material World, a bold retelling of story of human progress through six materials that built our world.
To my shame I had never read any John McPhee until earlier this year. But once you read a few of his books you a) can’t stop and b) start wishing (if you’re a non-fiction writer) that you could structure your sentences anything like he does. If I could cheat slightly, I would recommend both Annals of the Former World and Encounters With the Archdruid. Both very relevant to Material World. I’m semi grateful I hadn’t read them before writing mine as I would have spent most of my book attempting to imitate him.
The “characters” in Material World are the substances I write about, but along the way we meet some extraordinary (and extraordinarily conflicted) people who changed the world in both good and bad ways. Among them is Fritz Haber. There are a few good books about his life but, paradoxically, perhaps the best is a work of (semi) fiction: Benjamin Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World (translated by Adrian Nathan West). The first chapter (which is 99 per cent accurate) is the most poetic account of Haber’s life that you’ll ever read.
I love sweeping, perspective-blending works of historical non-fiction. Things like Daniel Yergin’s The Prize (if you have any interest in modern history, let alone energy, go and get a copy immediately). The one I read immediately after finishing Material World was Richard Rhodes’s The Making of the Atomic Bomb. It is utterly extraordinary. In an era where these weapons are suddenly a lot more relevant than before, I’d urge everyone (notably politicians) to read it. Especially the final, heart-wrenching section about Hiroshima.
Find out more about Material World, and the rest of this year’s British Academy Prize shortlist, here.
