Books tackling climate change, China, the NHS, European revolutions, ballet and music feature on the shortlist for this year’s Baillie Gifford prize for nonfiction.

The six-long list includes “exquisite, quite ambitious works of writing about art and music and history” as well as “very courageous investigative journalism”, said judging chair and Financial Times literary editor Frederick Studemann. He announced the list on Sunday live from an event at Cheltenham Literature Festival.

Half of the list comprises debut authors, which judge and Guardian theatre critic Arifa Akbar described as an “enormous surprise”. Hannah Barnes made the list with her first book Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock’s Gender Service for Children, which looks at what led to the closure of Britain’s only specialist clinic for transgender children. Barnes’ approach to the topic was “calm, measured and meticulous”, according to Studemann.

The shortlist’s second debut comes from Jeremy Eichler with Time’s Echo: The Second World War, The Holocaust, and The Music of Remembrance, which looks at how composers such as Richard Strauss and Dmitri Shostakovich transformed their experiences of the second world war and the Holocaust into musical works.

Guardian writer Tania Branigan also made the shortlist with her first book, Red Memory: Living, Remembering and Forgetting China’s Cultural Revolution, an exploration of the lasting impacts of the period through the stories of witnesses. Branigan puts a “human face on to a highly complex story”, according to judges.

The longest book on the list at 896 pages is Christopher Clark’s Revolutionary Spring: Fighting for a New World 1848-1849, about the uprisings that reshaped Europe. Clark “writes like an angel”, said Studemann.

The second-longest title at 784 pages is Jennifer Homans’ Mr. B: George Balanchine’s Twentieth Century, a biography of the co-founder of New York City Ballet. “I’m hopeless on the dancefloor,” said Studemann, “but this book takes you in. It’s a story of the 20th century.”

The final book on the list is John Vaillant’s Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World, which explores the devastation of modern wildfires and the history of the oil industry. The book is a “really remarkable climate change book” that is “pertinent and relevant”, said Studemann.

Alongside Studemann and Akbar on the judging panel are historian and author Andrea Wulf, the writer and historian Ruth Scurr, journalist and critic Tanjil Rashid and chief executive of the Royal Society of Arts Andrew Haldane.

The judges selected from a longlist of 13 books, which was in turn chosen from 265 books published between 1 November 2022 and 31 October 2023. The prize seeks to recognise the best of nonfiction and is open to authors of any nationality.

The winner of the £50,000 prize will be announced on Thursday 16 November at a ceremony at the Science Museum. This year, all shortlisted authors will receive £5,000, up from £1,000.

Previous winners include Antony Beevor, James Shapiro, Lucy Hughes-Hallett and Serhii Plokhy. Last year, Katherine Rundell won with her book Super Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne.

• Browse all the books on the Baillie Gifford 2023 shortlist and longlist at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.