British Academy Book Prize 2025 | Bronwen Everill’s reading recommendations
Posted by Bronwen Everill
To celebrate this year’s British Academy Book Prize, we’ve asked the shortlisted authors to share with us their reading recommendations – some books that shaped their own work, some brilliant examples of inventive non-fiction, some that are just great reads. Today, Bronwen Everill shares three books to sit alongside her own shortlisted work Africonomics: A History of Western Ignorance.
Meet all of the shortlisted authors at the British Academy Book Prize shortlist event on Tuesday 21 October at 6 p.m. at the British Academy and online. Tickets are free, but booking is essential – find out more here.
Anansi’s Gold by Yepoka Yeebo
My favourite recent book, this is a page-turning tale of international fraud centred on Ghana, London and Philadelphia in the 1970s and 1980s. Yeebo’s narrative is beautifully woven, bringing together the history of Ghana before and after independence with the jaw-dropping escapades of the extremely compelling con-artist, John Ackah Blay-Miezah. An absolute masterpiece of non-fiction.
Thinking Like An Economist by Elizabeth Popp Berman
This book helps to explain how economic value came to be seen as a neutral way of measuring policy, beginning in the 1950s. It explores the history of the discipline of economics across the twentieth century, and the way that its emergence as a key player in political decision-making shaped ideas of efficiency in government. Popp Berman is particularly interested in the US context, but the role that Robert McNamara plays in shaping this approach in the US ends up having a global impact through his tenure at the World Bank from 1968-1981.
The Night Trains by Charles Van Onselen
Van Onselen is a master storyteller, and here he focuses on a little-known colonial railroad that ran between the gold fields of northern South Africa and the Mozambican port city that is now Maputo. The train line was established as a public-private partnership that left it in a legal grey zone. Originally intended to move coal and machinery between the coast and the gold mines, it ended up transporting some 5 million Mozambican labourers to the mines of South Africa between 1910 and 1960. The book explores the history of South Africa’s gold rush, the economics of migration within Africa, and the logistics of infrastructure investment while never losing sight of the human story at its centre.
Bronwen Everill is the author of Africonomics: A History of Western Ignorance, published by William Collins. See all the books on the British Academy Book Prize shortlist here.
