Salman Rushdie’s memoir about surviving being stabbed is among the books longlisted for the 2024 Baillie Gifford prize for nonfiction.

Rushdie’s book, titled Knife, recounts the August 2022 attack, which happened on stage at the Chautauqua Institution in New York state, as well as the author’s recovery.

Alongside Rushdie on this year’s longlist is fellow Booker winner Richard Flanagan, with his most recent book, Question 7. No author to date has won both the Booker and Baillie Gifford prizes.

Quick Guide

The Baillie Gifford prize 2024 longlist

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Judgement at Tokyo by Gary J Bass (Picador)

Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here by Jonathan Blitzer (Picador)

The Story of a Heart by Rachel Clarke (Abacus)

Melting Point by Rachel Cockerell (Wildfire)

Question 7 by Richard Flanagan (Chatto)

Nuclear War by Annie Jacobsen (Torva)

A Man of Two Faces by Viet Thanh Nguyen (Corsair)

Wild Thing by Sue Prideaux (Faber)

Revolusi by David Van Reybrouck, translated by David Colmer and David McKay (Bodley Head)

Knife by Salman Rushdie (Cape)

What the Wild Sea Can Be by Helen Scales (Grove)

The Rebel’s Clinic by Adam Shatz (Apollo)

The winner of the prize, which recognises the best new nonfiction, will receive £50,000. Other shortlisted authors will receive £5,000 each.

Displacement, colonialism, nuclear war and the natural environment are among the themes explored in the books on this year’s 12-strong longlist.

The titles “shed new and brilliant light on our contemporary world through explorations of history, of memory, of science and nature,” said judging chair, the journalist Isabel Hilton. “Collectively, this wonderful reflection of creativity, critical thinking and great writing left us in no doubt that the nonfiction world is overflowing with energy and talent.”

Viet Thanh Nguyen, who won the Pulitzer prize for fiction in 2016, was longlisted for A Man of Two Faces, in which he unfolds his family’s story to examine refugeehood and identity among the Vietnamese diaspora.

The longlist features one debut book, Melting Point by Rachel Cockerell. She looks at the role of her great-grandfather David Jochelmann in the Galveston movement, in which 10,000 Jews fled to Texas before the first world war.

Also exploring displacement is Jonathan Blitzer’s Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here, which follows the lives of migrants arriving at the US southern border and the policies affecting them.

The list features two authors previously recognised by the prize. Rachel Clarke, who was longlisted in 2020, is this year selected for The Story of a Heart, which blends the history of heart transplant surgery with the stories of two children connected by a transplant. Sue Prideaux, shortlisted in 2012, has this time been chosen for Wild Thing, about the life of the French artist Paul Gauguin.

Joining Hilton on this year’s judging panel are author and journalist Heather Brooke, New Scientist comment and culture editor Alison Flood, Prospect culture editor Peter Hoskin, writer and critic Tomiwa Owolade, and author and restaurant critic Chitra Ramaswamy.

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Completing the 2024 longlist is Judgement at Tokyo by Gary J Bass, Nuclear War by Annie Jacobsen, Revolusi by David Van Reybrouck, translated by David Colmer and David McKay; What the Wild Sea Can Be by Helen Scales and The Rebel’s Clinic by Adam Shatz.

A shortlist of six titles will be announced on 10 October at Cheltenham literature festival, and the winner will be announced 19 November. The 2024 prize was open to books published between 1 November 2023 and 31 October 2024 written by authors of any nationality. A total of 349 books were considered this year.

Investment management company Baillie Gifford has sponsored the prize since 2016. Over the past year, the firm has been criticised over its links to Israel and fossil fuel companies by campaign group Fossil Free Books, leading to a number of authors cancelling appearances at literary festivals that were sponsored by the company.

By the beginning of June this year, all nine of the partnerships between the company and literary festivals had been cancelled, though the Baillie Gifford prize sponsorship remained in place. At the time, a spokesperson for the Baillie Gifford prize said that the prize had always found the company “to be collaborative, generous and transparent about their investments”.

Baillie Gifford “are contracted to sponsor the prize until the end of 2025 and we are fully committed to that relationship”, they added. Prize organisers told the Guardian that two authors asked to withdraw their book from consideration for this year’s prize, with one explicitly stating Baillie Gifford’s sponsorship as the reason.

Previous winners of the award include Antony Beevor, Jonathan Coe and Hallie Rubenhold. Last year, John Vaillant won the prize for Fire Weather, which tells the story of the wildfires that struck Fort McMurray in Alberta, Canada in 2016.

Salman Rushdie will be the subject of a new documentary on his life and attempted assassination in 2022.

Alex Gibney, the documentarian behind such films The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley, Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief and Taxi to the Dark Side, will direct Knife, inspired by Rushdie’s memoir of the same name which was published in April.

Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder recounts the Indian-born, British American novelist’s life and career, as well as the onstage stabbing in August 2022 that left him temporarily on a ventilator. The 76-year-old writer was speaking at an event in Chautauqua, New York, when a 24-year-old man from New Jersey rushed the stage and attacked him with a knife, stabbing him 15 times in the head, neck and chest. Rushdie lost vision in one eye and use of one hand as a result of the attack.

The film, first reported by Variety, will explore Rushdie’s recovery “in the broadest sense” using never-before-seen personal footage shot by his wife Rachel Eliza Griffiths, according to a press release. The film will cover both Rushdie’s physical and spiritual healing, from a book that was “necessary” him to write – “a way to take charge of what happened, and to answer violence with art”, he said.

The book delayed the trial of Rushdie’s alleged attacker, Hadi Matar, who pleaded not guilty to attempted murder and has been held without bail since the attack.

Knife will draw from Griffiths’s footage – the couple had been married just 11 months before the attack – as well as interviews and excerpts from Rushdie’s work, including the fatwa calling for his death issued by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989 for his book The Satanic Verses.

“It’s a delight and an honor to make this film about Salman Rushdie, an extraordinary novelist, a funny, poignant and resilient man, and one of the world’s most courageous defenders of freedom of speech,” Gibney said in a statement. “The opportunity to make this film about his recovery – in the broadest sense of the term – comes at a critical time. It gives me hope.”

Rushdie added in a statement: “I’m delighted we have Alex working with us on this film. We have long admired his brilliant work, from Taxi to the Dark Side and Going Clear to his recent portrait of Paul Simon. There couldn’t be a better person for the job.”

Gibney has already begun production on Knife, which is seeking a distributor. The Oscar-winning film-maker’s latest project, Musk, about the entrepreneur and world’s richest man Elon Musk, is forthcoming this year from HBO.