With Barack Obama sitting alongside Roald Dahl, Tolstoy, Bismarck and Caravaggio, biographies dominate the longlist for this year's Samuel Johnson prize, the UK's top literary award for non-fiction.
Biography has traditionally performed well in the Samuel Johnson, with previous winners including David Cairns's take on 19th-century composer Berlioz and TJ Binyon's life of Russian poet Pushkin, but it has been pushed out in recent years by more eclectic fare, from Philip Hoare's study of whales, Leviathan, to last year's winner Nothing to Envy by Barbara Demick, an investigation into the real lives of North Koreans.
This year eight of the 18-strong longlist for the £20,000 prize are biographies. New Yorker editor David Remnick makes the cut for his life of Obama, The Bridge, Donald Sturrock is longlisted for his well-received Storyteller: The Life of Roald Dahl and Jonathan Steinberg for Bismarck: A Life. Tolstoy by Rosamund Bartlett, Stuart Kelly's take on the life of Walter Scott, Scott-Land, and Caravaggio by Andrew Graham Dixon were also picked by judges. After winning the Costa biography award earlier this year, Edmund de Waal's bestselling The Hare with Amber Eyes, which tells the story of his family through 264 miniature Japanese carvings, is also likely to be a strong contender for the prize, while another personal take on biography is also provided by Daniel Swift's Bomber Country, the story of the author's search for his lost grandfather.
"Biographies are really strong this year," said historian, journalist and chair of judges Ben Macintyre, who with his fellow judges whittled down an initial line-up of almost 250 books to come up with the 18 titles on the longlist. "We've got such a range – everything from the classic, traditional, heavily footnoted books to biographies which are really narrative stories rather than academic works. It's an amazing tribute to how the genre of biography has expanded. You are not just getting books which begin with the beginning and end with the end of a life – they're almost memoirs, written by someone else."
Historical non-fiction is also strongly represented on this year's longlist: Simon Szreter and Kate Fisher take on the sex lives of ordinary people in early and mid 20th-century England in Sex Before the Sexual Revolution, Rodric Braithwaite looks at the Russians in Afghanistan in Afgantsy, and Frank Dikötter was picked by judges for Mao's Great Famine. Liberty's Exiles by Maya Jasanoff investigates the lives of the Americans who fled their country after the end of British rule, while John Stubbs has researched the English Civil War in Reprobates.
The longlist is completed with Richard Lloyd Parry's investigation into the disappearance of Lucie Blackman in Japan, People Who Eat Darkness, Matt Ridley's look at human progress The Rational Optimist, Guy Deutscher's exploration of culture and language Through the Language Glass, Anatole Kaletsky's wide-ranging take on the financial crisis Capitalism 4.0 and journalist Ed Vulliamy's tale of the war along the US border with Mexico, Amexica.
"These are not doorstop, porridge prose books. They are all tremendously well-written," said Macintyre, who is joined on the judging panel by Prospect editor-at-large David Goodhart, journalist and author Sam Leith, biographer Brenda Maddox and historian Amanda Vickery. "I would say this, being a non-fiction writer, but the whole definition of what non-fiction is has hugely expanded in the last 20 years. Biography has been particularly strong this year but there have been some very, very good books on the crash and where the global economy is going. One shouldn't think of the Samuel Johnson as being just a historically-minded prize: we've got some very contemporary books on there as well."
Part of the fun in judging the prize, he said, was "trying to compare chalk with cheese". "It's a strange thing to find yourself going from a wonderfully dense biography of Bismarck to a hilarious account of a stand-up comedian on what it's like to get the shakes before a live performance."
The shortlist will be revealed on 14 June, with the winner announced on 6 July.
The longlist in full:
Tolstoy by Rosamund Bartlett
Afghantsy by Rodric Braithwaite
Through the Language Glass by Guy Deutscher
The Hare with Amber Eyes by Edmund De Waal
Mao's Great Famine by Frank Dikötter
Caravaggio by Andrew Graham Dixon
Liberty's Exiles by Maya Jasanoff
Capitalism 4.0 by Anatole Kaletsky
Scott-land: The Man Who Invented a Nation by Stuart Kelly
People Who Eat Darkness by Richard Lloyd Parry
The Bridge by David Remnick
The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley
Bismarck: A Life by Jonathan Steinberg
Reprobates by John Stubbs
Storyteller: The Life of Roald Dahl by Donald Sturrock
Bomber County by Daniel Swift
Sex Before the Sexual Revolution by Simon Szreter and Kate Fisher
Amexica: War Along The Borderline by Ed Vulliamy
