This year's shortlist of six books was chosen from the following longlist of 20 non-fiction titles and announced on 15 May 2008:
Mad, Bad and Sad by Lisa Appignanesi (Virago)
Miracles of Life by JG Ballard (Harper Collins)
Nothing to be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes (Jonathan Cape)
Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart by Tim Butcher (Chatto & Windus)
Crow Country by Mark Cocker (Jonathan Cape)
Finding Moonshine: A Mathematician's Journey Through Symmetry by Marcus du Sautoy (Fourth Estate)
The Whisperers by Orlando Figes (Penguin)
The Authorized Biography of VS Naipaul by Patrick French (Picador)
Rudolf Nureyev by Julie Kavanagh (Fig Tree)
Austerity Britain 1945-1951 by David Kynaston (Bloomsbury)
Mrs Woolf and the Servants by Alison Light (Fig Tree)
Cold Cream: My Early Life and Other Mistakes by Ferdinand Mount (Bloomsbury)
Watching the Door by Kevin Myers (Atlantic Books)
Confessions of an Eco Sinner by Fred Pearce (Eden Project Books)
Great Hatred, Little Room: Making Peace in Northern Ireland by Jonathan Powell (Bodley Head)
A Life of Picasso, Volume III: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932 by John Richardson (Jonathan Cape)
The Discovery of France by Graham Robb (Picador)
The Rest is Noise by Alex Ross (Fourth Estate)
The Suspicions of Mr Whicher by Kate Summerscale (Bloomsbury)
The Brother Gardeners by Andrea Wulf (William Heinemann)
The winner of The BBC Four Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction 2008 will be announced at an awards ceremony in the Ballroom at the South Bank Centre, London on 15 July 2008 and will be broadcast live on BBC Four the following Sunday.
