Human rights lawyer Philippe Sands has beaten the Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich to win the Baillie Gifford prize for nonfiction for East West Street, his account of the history of genocide and crimes against humanity.

Accepting his award at the RIBA in London on Tuesday night, Sands announced he would share the £30,000 prize with his fellow shortlisted author and friend Hisham Matar and that they would donate the money entirely to a refugee charity of their joint choosing – “minus the cost of a bottle of cognac for Hisham and a jar of pickles for me”.



After his pledge, Sands thanked several partners from the investment company Baillie Gifford, the prize sponsor, for agreeing to match the donation from their personal funds, as well as the chair of the judges, the economist Stephanie Flanders, who will donate her honorarium from her role judging the prize.

The nonfiction award, formerly known as the Samuel Johnson prize, has previously been won by titles such as Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk and Frank Dikötter’s Mao’s Great Famine.



Sands’ East West Street begins and ends with the 1945-46 Nuremberg trials, in particular that of the “butcher of Poland”, Hitler’s personal lawyer Hans Frank, and looks at how the concepts of genocide and crimes against humanity were included in the judgment. It also explores the author’s family history, as he investigates what happened to his mother’s family in Lviv and Vienna during the second world war.



Baillie Gifford judge Jonathan Derbyshire praised the book’s “scale, ambition and artistry”, as well as “the way it handles the collision of private and public stories with European history”.

“It is a biography of a city, an excavation of certain secrets or holes in his family history, and really impressively, it’s also the biography of a pair of ideas, genocide and crimes against humanity … It’s a reminder that these words, which for most of us are a settled part of our moral vocabulary, are recent acquisitions, and that only the incredible persistence and bravery of the figures in the book meant they became a part of the architecture of international law,” said Derbyshire. “It’s an incredible performance to hold the strands together and make them cohere.”

Derbyshire, who is the executive comment editor of the Financial Times, said that judges didn’t consider the timeliness of East West Street when they included it on the shortlist, but admitted it “has wider resonance” today. The book, he said, tells the story of the origins of international law, which “we have lived with for the last 70 years” but which, “after recent events looks slightly more perilous than it did a week ago”.

“All the other books on the shortlist had extraordinary qualities of their own, but there was an urgency to this one. We’re extremely happy with our choice,” said Derbyshire.

On stage, Sands said anticipation had not affected his evening. “For a barrister who is used to going to court and assuming you’ve lost every case, it was not perhaps as hard as some may have thought to sit through such an evening. But I am truly surprised and deeply grateful to the judges,” he said.

In a passionate acceptance speech, Sands likened current events in London to pre-war Lviv and said East West Street was, “very sadly, timely”.



“Individuals make a difference at difficult times, and even in the face of adversity it is possible to make a mark … [these ideas] are under threat by the government in this country, they will be under threat from the next government in the United States and the book is a salutary reminder we must take absolutely nothing for granted,” he said to applause.

“Each and every one of us, in our own ways, in even the most small, little things, must fight to do the right thing in these difficult times that are coming because they plainly are coming.”

Flanders said that any of the shortlisted titles, which included Alexievich’s Second-Hand Time, Margo Jefferson’s Negroland and Matar’s The Return, would have been a worthy winner of this year’s award. “In the end, we agreed that Philippe Sands had pulled off something extraordinary with this book … This is not one story but several different stories, woven together – each important and each deeply personal to the author,” said Flanders, the former BBC economics editor. “The result is a multilayered history that is impressive in its own right but also a satisfying, suspenseful read.”

Sands is a professor of law at University College London and a leading human rights lawyer, who has worked on cases including Augusto Pinochet, Congo, Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Iraq and Guantánamo. “As a litigator you are a storyteller,” he said, describing East West Street as a “double detective story”.

“It’s a search to unlock a family secret: the circumstances in which my grandfather and my grandmother, along with my mother, left Vienna and the course of the years that followed; and it’s a detective story about the origins of crimes against humanity and genocide,” he added. “[These are] two subjects that occupy my life as an academic, but also as a lawyer doing cases in international courts.”

Flanders and Derbyshire were joined on the judging panel by the science writer Philip Ball, the scholar Sophie Ratcliffe and Rohan Silva, the co-founder of social enterprise Second Home.