Biography of Alexander the Great wins the Baillie Gifford Prize for nonfiction

A sweeping biography of Alexander the Great has won the Baillie Gifford Prize for nonfiction, in what judges and observers described as the latest sign of booming public fascination with the world of ancient Greece. Edmund Richardson's "Alexander: God, King, Man" was named the winner of the 50,000 pound ($67,000) prize at a ceremony in London on Wednesday.

British journalist Kirsty Lang, who chaired the judging panel, said the book is the first work of ancient history ever to win the prize and praised it as a volume that "reads like a novel."

"It's very immersive. You really feel that you're there on the battlefield, marching across Central Asia and Egypt with Alexander," Lang said. She noted that the book also "contains a lot of new research," including Richardson's own translations of sources from 12 ancient languages.

Richardson, a professor of classics at Durham University in England, spent a decade researching the Macedonian conqueror, a stretch he jokingly called "far too long, down far too many rabbit holes." Alexander inherited a debt-ridden kingdom at the age of 20, went on to conquer territory stretching from Greece to India and died at 32.

"No one called him Alexander the Great in his lifetime," Richardson told The Associated Press. "No one thought he was going to conquer the world. He was his father's slightly disappointing son, even when he took the throne. He was a tributary, not the main event. And then he starts to do all of these astonishing things."

Richardson argued that Alexander's military expedition "transforms reality more profoundly than almost any other event in human history." He said the campaign connected the world in ways it had never been connected before, unleashing a flood of knowledge, ideas, religious belief, science, astronomy and art that flowed from Babylon to Greece, from Greece to modern-day Afghanistan and from Egypt across to Italy.

The judges described the winning book as "a love letter to the humanities and the work of historians and archaeologists," a notable tribute at a time when those disciplines are under strain from university funding cuts in the United Kingdom and elsewhere.

Lang said the book should resonate with fans of Christopher Nolan's epic film adaptation of "The Odyssey," which has helped drive the current surge of popular interest in the ancient Greek classics. "They knew to tell great stories," Lang said. "Life, death, love, relationships, tragedy. They speak to the most basic of human emotions and motivations."

Founded in 1999, the Baillie Gifford Prize honors English-language books in current affairs, history, politics, science, sport, travel, biography, autobiography and the arts, and it has been credited with bringing an eclectic range of fact-based writing to a wider audience. This year's winner was selected from more than 350 entries and prevailed over five other finalists, among them American journalist Patrick Radden Keefe's bestseller "London Falling," the true story of a teenager who died after being caught up in the shadowy world of London's superrich.

The remaining finalists were Nicholas Boggs' James Baldwin biography "Baldwin: A Love Story"; Matthew Sweet's life of romance novelist Barbara Cartland, "The Great Dictator"; Anand Gopal's Syrian saga "Days of Love and Rage"; and Andrea Wulf's "The Traveler," about the 18th-century naturalist and explorer George Forster. Last year's prize went to Australian writer Helen Garner for her collected diaries, "How to End a Story."