| 2025 | Winner | How to End a Story: Collected Diaries | Helen Garner | Text Publishing |
| 2025 | Finalist | Captives and Companions: A History of Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Islamic World | Justin Marozzi | Penguin Books |
| 2025 | Finalist | Electric Spark: The Enigma of Muriel Spark | Frances Wilson | Bloomsbury |
| 2025 | Finalist | Lone Wolf: Walking the Faultlines of Europe | Adam Weymouth | Unknown |
| 2025 | Finalist | The Boundless Deep: Young Tennyson, Science and the Crisis of Belief | Richard Holmes | Unknown |
| 2025 | Finalist | The Revolutionists: The Story of the Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970s | Jason Burke | Unknown |
| 2024 | Winner | Question 7 | Richard Flanagan | Knopf |
| 2024 | Finalist | A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, A History, A Memorial | Viet Thanh Nguyen | Grove Press |
| 2024 | Finalist | Nuclear War: A Scenario | Annie Jacobsen | Penguin Publishing Group |
| 2024 | Finalist | Revolusi: Indonesia and the Birth of the Modern World | David Van Reybrouck | W. W. Norton |
| 2024 | Finalist | The Story of a Heart | Rachel Clarke | Unknown |
| 2024 | Finalist | Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin | Sue Prideaux | W. W. Norton |
| 2023 | Winner | Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World | John Vaillant | Knopf |
| 2023 | Finalist | Mr. B: George Balanchine's Twentieth Century | Jennifer Homans | Random House |
| 2023 | Finalist | Red Memory: Living, Remembering and Forgetting China's Cultural Revolution, | Tania Branigan | W. W. Norton |
| 2023 | Finalist | Revolutionary Spring: Fighting for a New World 1848–1849 | Christopher Clark | Unknown |
| 2023 | Finalist | Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock's Gender Service for Children | Hannah Barnes | Swift Press |
| 2023 | Finalist | Time's Echo: The Second World War, The Holocaust, and The Music of Remembrance | Jeremy Eichler | Knopf |
| 2022 | Winner | Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne | Katherine Rundell | Picador |
| 2022 | Finalist | A Fortunate Woman: A Country Doctor’s Story | Polly Morland | Pan Macmillan |
| 2022 | Finalist | Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire | Caroline Elkins | Unknown |
| 2022 | Finalist | My Fourth Time We Drowned: Seeking Refuge on the World's Deadliest Migration Route | Sally Hayden | Melville House |
| 2022 | Finalist | The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World | Jonathan Freedland | Unknown |
| 2022 | Finalist | The Restless Republic: Britain Without a Crown | Anna Keay | HarperCollins |
| 2021 | Winner | Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty | Patrick Radden Keefe | Doubleday |
| 2021 | Finalist | Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945–1955 | Harald Jähner | Knopf |
| 2021 | Finalist | Fall: The Mystery of Robert Maxwell | John Preston | Viking |
| 2021 | Finalist | Free: Coming of Age at the End of History | Lea Ypi | Allen Lane |
| 2021 | Finalist | Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape | Cal Flyn | HarperCollins |
| 2021 | Finalist | Things I Have Withheld | Kei Miller | Canongate |
| 2020 | Winner | One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time | Craig Brown | Fourth Estate |
| 2020 | Finalist | Black Spartacus: The Epic Life of Toussaint Louverture | Sudhir Hazareesingh | Allen Lane |
| 2020 | Finalist | Our Bodies, Their Battlefield: What War Does to Women | Christina Lamb | HarperCollins |
| 2020 | Finalist | Stranger in the Shogun's City: A Japanese Woman and Her World | Amy Stanley | Scribner |
| 2020 | Finalist | The Haunting of Alma Fielding: A True Ghost Story | Kate Summerscale | Bloomsbury |
| 2020 | Finalist | The Idea of the Brain: A History | Matthew Cobb | Profile Books |
| 2019 | Winner | The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper | Hallie Rubenhold | Doubleday |
| 2019 | Finalist | Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud and the Last Trial of Harper Lee | Casey Cep | Knopf |
| 2019 | Finalist | Guest House for Young Widows: Among the Women of ISIS | Azadeh Moaveni | Random House |
| 2019 | Finalist | Maoism: A Global History | Julia Lovell | Knopf |
| 2019 | Finalist | On Chapel Sands: My Mother and Other Missing Persons | Laura Cumming | Chatto & Windus |
| 2019 | Finalist | The Lives of Lucian Freud: Youth | William Feaver | Unknown |
| 2018 | Winner | Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy | Serhii Plokhy | Penguin Publishing Group |
| 2018 | Finalist | Amateur: A True Story About What Makes a Man | Thomas Page McBee | Scribner |
| 2018 | Finalist | Hello World: How to Be Human in the Age of the Machine | Hannah Fry | Doubleday |
| 2018 | Finalist | Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China's Last Golden Age | Stephen R. Platt | Knopf |
| 2018 | Finalist | She Has Her Mother's Laugh: The Powers, Perversions and Potential of Heredity | Carl Zimmer | Penguin Press |
| 2018 | Finalist | The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War | Ben Macintyre | Penguin Books |
| 2017 | Winner | How to Survive a Plague: The Inside Story of How Citizens and Science Tamed AIDS | David France | Vintage Books |
| 2017 | Finalist | An Odyssey: A Father, a Son and an Epic | Daniel Mendelsohn | HarperCollins |
| 2017 | Finalist | Belonging: The Story of the Jews, 1492–1900 | Simon Schama | Unknown |
| 2017 | Finalist | Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe | Kapka Kassabova | Graywolf Press |
| 2017 | Finalist | The Islamic Enlightenment The Modern Struggle Between Faith and Reason | Christopher de Bellaigue | Liveright |
| 2017 | Finalist | To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death | Mark O'Connell | Anchor |
| 2016 | Winner | East West Street: On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity | Philippe Sands | Knopf |
| 2016 | Finalist | Negroland: A Memoir | Margo Jefferson | Vintage Books |
| 2016 | Finalist | Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets | Svetlana Alexievich | Random House |
| 2016 | Finalist | The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between | Hisham Matar | Vintage Books |
| 2015 | Winner | NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and How to Think Smarter About People Who Think Differently | Steve Silberman | Penguin Press |
| 2015 | Finalist | Landmarks | Robert Macfarlane | Hamish Hamilton |
| 2015 | Finalist | Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life | Jonathan Bate | HarperCollins |
| 2015 | Finalist | The Four-Dimensional Human: Ways of Being in the Digital World | Laurence Scott | Unknown |
| 2015 | Finalist | The Unravelling: High Hopes and Missed Opportunities in Iraq | Emma Sky | PublicAffairs |
| 2015 | Finalist | This Divided Island: Stories from the Sri Lankan Civil War | Samanth Subramanian | Unknown |
| 2014 | Winner | H Is for Hawk | Helen Macdonald | Jonathan Cape |
| 2014 | Finalist | Common People: The History of an English Family | Alison Light | Penguin Books |
| 2014 | Finalist | Roy Jenkins: a Well-Rounded Life | John Campbell | Jonathan Cape |
| 2014 | Finalist | The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World | Greg Grandin | Metropolitan Books |
| 2014 | Finalist | The Iceberg: A Memoir | Marion Coutts | Grove Atlantic |
| 2014 | Finalist | Village of Secrets: Defying the Nazis in Vichy France | Caroline Moorehead | Chatto & Windus |
| 2013 | Winner | The Pike: Gabriele D'Annunzio, Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War | Lucy Hughes-Hallett | Fourth Estate |
| 2013 | Finalist | A Sting in the Tale: My Adventures with Bumblebees | Dave Goulson | Jonathan Cape |
| 2013 | Finalist | Empires of the Dead: How One Man's Vision Led to the Creation of WWI's World Graves | David Crane | William Collins |
| 2013 | Finalist | Margaret Thatcher: The Authorised Biography | Charles Moore | Allen Lane |
| 2013 | Finalist | Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan | William Dalrymple | Bloomsbury |
| 2013 | Finalist | Under Another Sky: Journeys in Roman Britain | Charlotte Higgins | Vintage Books |
| 2012 | Winner | Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest | Wade Davis | Vintage Books |
| 2012 | Finalist | Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity | Katherine Boo | Random House |
| 2012 | Finalist | Strindberg: A Life | Sue Prideaux | Yale University Press |
| 2012 | Finalist | The Better Angels of our Nature: A History of Violence and Humanity | Steven Pinker | Allen Lane |
| 2012 | Finalist | The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot | Robert Macfarlane | Hamish Hamilton |
| 2012 | Finalist | The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain | Paul Preston | W. W. Norton |
| 2011 | Winner | Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958–1962 | Frank Dikötter | Walker & Company |
| 2011 | Finalist | Bismarck: A Life (biography of Otto von Bismarck) | Jonathan Steinberg | Unknown |
| 2011 | Finalist | Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane (biography of Caravaggio) | Andrew Graham-Dixon | Allen Lane |
| 2011 | Finalist | Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World | Maya Jasanoff | Knopf |
| 2011 | Finalist | Reprobates: The Cavaliers of the English Civil War | John Stubbs | Viking |
| 2011 | Finalist | The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves | Matt Ridley | Unknown |
| 2010 | Winner | Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea | Barbara Demick | Spiegel & Grau |
| 2010 | Finalist | A Gambling Man: Charles II and the Restoration | Jenny Uglow | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| 2010 | Finalist | Alex's Adventures in Numberland: Dispatches from the Wonderful World of Mathematics | Alex Bellos | Bloomsbury |
| 2010 | Finalist | Blood Knots: On Fathers, Friendship and Fishing | Luke Jennings | Unknown |
| 2010 | Finalist | Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human | Richard Wrangham | Basic Books |
| 2010 | Finalist | Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System—and Themselves | Andrew Ross Sorkin | Viking |
| 2009 | Winner | Leviathan or, The Whale | Philip Hoare | Fourth Estate |
| 2009 | Finalist | Bad Science | Ben Goldacre | McClelland & Stewart |
| 2009 | Finalist | Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World | Liaquat Ahamed | Penguin Press |
| 2009 | Finalist | Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate about the Nature of Reality | Manjit Kumar | HarperCollins |
| 2009 | Finalist | The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science | Richard Holmes | HarperCollins |
| 2009 | Finalist | The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon | David Grann | Doubleday |
| 2008 | Winner | The Suspicions of Mr Whicher or the Murder at Road Hill House | Kate Summerscale | Unknown |
| 2008 | Finalist | Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart | Tim Butcher | Chatto & Windus |
| 2008 | Finalist | Crow Country | Mark Cocker | Unknown |
| 2008 | Finalist | The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century | Alex Ross | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| 2008 | Finalist | The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia | Orlando Figes | Metropolitan Books |
| 2008 | Finalist | The World is What it is: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul | Patrick French | Knopf |
| 2007 | Winner | Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone | Rajiv Chandrasekaran | Knopf |
| 2007 | Finalist | Brainwash: The Secret History of Mind Control | Dominic Streatfeild | Picador |
| 2007 | Finalist | Daughter of the Desert: The Extraordinary Life of Gertrude Bell | Georgina Howell | Macmillan |
| 2007 | Finalist | Having It So Good: Britain in the Fifties | Peter Hennessy | Allen Lane |
| 2007 | Finalist | Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo Van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance | Ian Buruma | Penguin Press |
| 2007 | Finalist | The Verneys: A True Story of Love, War, and Madness in Seventeenth-Century England | Adrian Tinniswood | Riverhead Books |
| 2006 | Winner | 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare | James S. Shapiro | Faber & Faber |
| 2006 | Finalist | Bad Faith: A Forgotten History of Family & Fatherland | Carmen Callil | Jonathan Cape |
| 2006 | Finalist | Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 | Tony Judt | Penguin Books |
| 2006 | Finalist | The Orientalist: In Search of a Man Caught Between East and West | Tom Reiss | Vintage Books |
| 2006 | Finalist | The Sale of the Late King's Goods: Charles I and His Art Collection | Jerry Brotton | Unknown |
| 2006 | Finalist | Untold Stories | Alan Bennett | Faber & Faber |
| 2005 | Winner | Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of B.S. Johnson | Jonathan Coe | Picador |
| 2005 | Finalist | Istanbul: Memories and the City | Orhan Pamuk | Knopf |
| 2005 | Finalist | Matisse the Master: A Life of Henri Matisse, the Conquest of Colour, 1909–1954 | Hilary Spurling | Knopf |
| 2005 | Finalist | Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found | Suketu Mehta | Knopf |
| 2005 | Finalist | Stuart: A Life Backwards | Alexander Masters | Fourth Estate |
| 2005 | Finalist | The Italian Boy: Murder and Grave-Robbery in 1830s London | Sarah Wise | Metropolitan Books |
| 2004 | Winner | Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall | Anna Funder | Granta Books |
| 2004 | Finalist | A Short History of Nearly Everything | Bill Bryson | Random House |
| 2004 | Finalist | Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps | Anne Applebaum | Doubleday |
| 2004 | Finalist | John Clare: A Biography | Jonathan Bate | Picador |
| 2004 | Finalist | Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic | Tom Holland | Little, Brown |
| 2004 | Finalist | The Zanzibar Chest: A Memoir of Love and War | Aidan Hartley | Unknown |
| 2003 | Winner | Pushkin: A Biography | T. J. Binyon | Penguin Publishing Group |
| 2003 | Finalist | Dr Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation: The Definitive Guide to the Evolutionary Biology of Sex | Olivia Judson | Metropolitan Books |
| 2003 | Finalist | Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia | Orlando Figes | Henry Holt and Company |
| 2003 | Finalist | Nelson: Love and Fame | Edgar Vincent | Yale University Press |
| 2003 | Finalist | Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self | Claire Tomalin | Vintage Books |
| 2003 | Finalist | The Devil that Danced on the Water: A Daughter's Memoir of her Father, her Family, her Country and a Continent | Aminatta Forna | Grove Press |
| 2002 | Winner | Peacemakers: The Paris Peace Conference of 1919 and Its Attempt to End War | Margaret MacMillan | John Murray |
| 2002 | Finalist | Churchill: a Biography | Roy Jenkins | Macmillan |
| 2002 | Finalist | The Invention of Clouds: How an Amateur Meteorologist Forged the Language of the Skies | Richard Hamblyn | Picador |
| 2002 | Finalist | The Snow Geese | William Fiennes | Unknown |
| 2002 | Finalist | The Voices of Morebath: Reformation and Rebellion in an English Village | Eamon Duffy | Yale University Press |
| 2002 | Finalist | Unfinest Hour: Britain and the Destruction of Bosnia | Brendan Simms | Penguin Books |
| 2001 | Winner | The Third Reich: A New History | Michael Burleigh | Pan Books |
| 2001 | Finalist | John Maynard Keynes, Fighting for Britain 1937-1946 | Robert Skidelsky | Viking |
| 2001 | Finalist | Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Russia | Catherine Merridale | Penguin Books |
| 2001 | Finalist | Prince of Princes: The Life of Potemkin | Simon Sebag Montefiore | Weidenfeld & Nicolson |
| 2001 | Finalist | Rimbaud | Graham Robb | Picador |
| 2001 | Finalist | Trilobite!: Eyewitness to Evolution | Richard Fortey | Flamingo |
| 2000 | Winner | Berlioz: Volume 2 | David Cairns | Viking |
| 2000 | Finalist | Deliver us from Evil: Warlords, Peacekeepers and a World of Endless Conflict | William Shawcross | Bloomsbury |
| 2000 | Finalist | Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters | Matt Ridley | HarperCollins |
| 2000 | Finalist | Karl Marx | Francis Wheen | Fourth Estate |
| 2000 | Finalist | Playing the Moldovans at Tennis | Tony Hawks | Ebury Publishing |
| 2000 | Finalist | Yeats's Ghosts: The Secret Life of W. B. Yeats | Brenda Maddox | Harper Perennial |
| 1999 | Winner | Stalingrad | Antony Beevor | Viking |
| 1999 | Finalist | C: Because Cowards Get Cancer Too | John Diamond | Ebury Publishing |
| 1999 | Finalist | Coleridge: Darker Reflections | Richard Holmes | Hodder & Stoughton |
| 1999 | Finalist | Hitler 1889–1936: Hubris | Ian Kershaw | W. W. Norton |
| 1999 | Finalist | Pilate: The Biography of an Invented Man | Ann Wroe | Jonathan Cape |
| 1999 | Finalist | The Wealth and Poverty of Nations | David Landes | Abacus |