Shortlist

Joan Bakewell She's Leaving Home, Little Brown Book Group, 2011

Tom Benn The Doll Princess, Jonathan Cape (Random House), 2012

A S Byatt Ragnarok: The End of the Gods, Canongate Books, 2011

Sarah Hall The Beautiful Indifference, Faber & Faber, 2011

Edward Hogan The Hunger Trace, Simon and Schuster, 2011

Mark Illis The Last Word, Salt, 2011

Jackie Kay Reality, Reality, Picador, 2012

Val McDermid The Retribution, Little Brown Book Group, 2011

Jane Rogers The Testament of Jessie Lamb, Canongate Books/Sandstone Press, 2011

Joe Stretch The Adult, Jonathan Cape (Random House), 2012

Emma Jane Unsworth Hungry, The Stars and Everything, Hidden Gem Press, 2011

Paul Wilson The Visiting Angel, Tindal Street Press, 2011

Robert Williams How the Trouble Started, Faber & Faber, 2012

Simon Armitage Walking Home, Faber & Faber, 2012

Henrietta Heald William Armstrong: Magician of the North, McNidder & Grace, 2011

Robert and Patricia Malcolmson Nella Last in the 1950s, Profile Books, 2010

Keith Richardson Jack's Yak, River Greta Writer, 2011

Alan Shelston Brief Lives: Elizabeth Gaskell, Hesperus Press, 2010

Jean Sprackland Strands, Jonathan Cape (Random House), 2012

Chris Wadsworth The Man Who Couldn't Stop Drawing, Studio Publications, 2011

Bill Williams Jews and Other Foreigners, Manchester University Press, 2011

Jeanette Winterson Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, Vintage (Random House), 2012

Keith Wrightson Ralph Tailor's Summer: A Scrivener, his City and the Plague, Yale University Press, 2011