6th October 2026: The Financial Times and Standard Chartered have announced the shortlist for the 2026 Business Book of the Year Award. Now in its twenty-second year, the award is an essential calendar fixture for authors, publishers and the global business community. Each year it recognises a book which provides the ‘most compelling and enjoyable insight into modern business issues’.
This year’s shortlisted books, selected by ten distinguished judges, are:
1873: The First Great Depression and the Making of the Modern World by Liaquat Ahamed, Cornerstone (UK), Penguin Press (US)
Off the Scales: The Inside Story of Ozempic and the Race to Cure Obesity by Aimee Donnellan, Fourth Estate (UK), St. Martin's Press (US)
The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind and the Quest for Superintelligence by Sebastian Mallaby, Allen Lane (UK), Penguin Press (US)
Project Maven: A Marine Colonel, His Team, and the Dawn of AI Warfare by Katrina Manson, W.W. Norton (UK & US)
Blood Will Flow: The Murderous Business of Oil and Gas by Alex Perry, Ithaka Press, (UK)
Prophecy: Prediction, Power and the Fight for the Future, from Ancient Oracles to AI by Carissa Véliz, Swift (UK), Doubleday (US)
FT Editor Roula Khalaf said: “This is a shortlist of impressive breadth and depth. All the books are captivating reads about significant trends affecting business, from disruptive new technology to geoeconomic turmoil. The authors dig deep, ask the big questions, and provide compelling insights into business, leadership and how to navigate uncertainty.”
Tanuj Kapilashrami, Group Chief Operating Officer, Standard Chartered, said: “The books on this year’s shortlist examine some of the forces redefining business and society, combining rigorous research with insightful storytelling. It is an impressive range of topics, from artificial intelligence and technological change to global finance, energy and geopolitical power. Together, they challenge leaders to look beyond the immediate and understand how today’s decisions shape tomorrow’s opportunities and risks. Today, critical thinking and fresh perspectives matter more than ever, which is what makes this shortlist so compelling.”
The judging panel, chaired by Roula Khalaf, comprises:
- Mimi Alemayehou, Founder and Managing Partner, Semai Ventures LLC
- Daisuke Arakawa, Executive Vice President for Global Business, Nikkei Inc.
- Sherry Coutu, Entrepreneur, Angel Investor and Board Leader
- Mohamed El-Erian, Rene M Kern Professor of Practice at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, Chief Economic Advisor, Allianz and Chair, Gramercy Funds Management
- Tanuj Kapilashrami, Group Chief Operating Officer, Standard Chartered
- James Kondo, Chairman, International House of Japan
- Emmanuel Roman, Chief Executive Officer, PIMCO
- Nicolai Tangen, CEO, Norges Bank Investment Management
- Shriti Vadera, Chair of The Royal Shakespeare Company and The World Bank Private Sector Investment Lab
The winner of the 2026 Financial Times Business Book of the Year Award will be announced on Wednesday 2 December at an event in London hosted by FT Editor Roula Khalaf, Standard Chartered Group Chief Operating Officer, Tanuj Kapilashrami, and Nikkei Inc. Executive Vice President for Global Business Daisuke Arakawa. The winner will receive £30,000 and the author(s) of each of the remaining shortlisted books will be awarded £10,000.
Previous Business Book of the Year winners include: Stephen Witt for The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang and Nvidia, the company shaping the future of AI; Parmy Olson for Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT and the Race That Will Change the World (2024); Amy Edmondson for Right Kind of Wrong: Why Learning to Fail Can Teach Us to Thrive (2023); Chris Miller for Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology (2022); Nicole Perlroth for This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race (2021); Sarah Frier for No Filter: The Inside Story of How Instagram Transformed Business, Celebrity and Our Culture (2020); Caroline Criado Perez for Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men (2019); John Carreyrou for Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup (2018); Amy Goldstein for Janesville: An American Story (2017); Sebastian Mallaby for The Man Who Knew: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan (2016); Martin Ford for Rise of the Robots (2015); Thomas Piketty for Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014); Brad Stone for The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon (2013); Steve Coll for Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power (2012); Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo for Poor Economics (2011); Raghuram Rajan for Fault Lines (2010); Liaquat Ahamed for The Lords of Finance (2009); Mohamed El-Erian for When Markets Collide (2008); William D. Cohan for The Last Tycoons (2007); James Kynge for China Shakes the World (2006); and Thomas Friedman, the inaugural award winner in 2005, for The World is Flat.
To learn more about the award, visit ft.com/bookaward and follow the conversation at #BBYA26.
Photographs of the authors and books on the 2026 shortlist can be downloaded here.
For further information please contact:
UK: Katrina Power
T: +44 (0) 79639 62538
US: Nick Davies, Fortier Public Relations
T: +1 914-356-5171
UK: Cat Goacher, Financial Times
M +44 7711 928513
Notes to editors on The Financial Times and Standard Chartered Business Book of the Year Award
Entry forms and details of the terms and conditions are available from www.ft.com/bookaward. The annual award aims to identify the book that provides the most compelling and enjoyable insight into modern business issues, including management, finance and economics. The shortlist of six titles was chosen from a longlist of 15. The winner will be announced on Wednesday 2nd December 2026. Submissions are invited from publishers or bona fide imprints based in any country.
Eligibility
Books must be published for the first time in the English language, or in English translation, between 16 November 2025 and 15 November 2026. There is no limit to the number of submissions from each publisher/imprint, provided they fit the criteria, and books from all genres except anthologies are eligible. There are no restrictions of gender, age or nationality of authors. Authors who are current employees of the Financial Times or the close relatives of such employees, are not eligible.
About the Financial Times
The Financial Times is one of the world’s leading news organisations, recognised internationally for its authority, integrity and accuracy. The FT has a record paying readership of 1.9mn, while the wider FT Group has a global paying audience of 3.4mn across its portfolio of journalism, products and services.
About Standard Chartered
We are a leading international banking group, with a presence in 55 of the world’s most dynamic markets. Our purpose is to drive commerce and prosperity through our unique diversity, and our heritage and values are expressed in our brand promise, here for good. Standard Chartered PLC is listed on the London and Hong Kong stock exchanges. For more stories and expert opinions please visit Insights at sc.com. Follow Standard Chartered on X, LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook
About Nikkei
Founded in Japan in 1876, Nikkei has grown into one of the world’s largest independent media groups, with approximately 2.5 million paid subscribers in Japan. Our flagship English-language publication, Nikkei Asia, provides comprehensive pan-Asian reporting that serves as a crucial decision-making tool for our readers. In 2015, Nikkei expanded its international presence by acquiring the Financial Times, another global media brand. With the purpose of offering “better insights for a better world”, we never pander to power and are committed to delivering accurate and fact-based economic news. Our daily mission is to provide equitable, unbiased content that enables our readers across the globe to make better decisions.
THE SHORTLIST FOR THE FINANCIAL TIMES AND SCHRODERS BUSINESS BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD 2026
1873: The First Great Depression and the Making of the Modern World by Liaquat Ahamed, Cornerstone (UK), Penguin Press (US)
In the first major book in seventeen years from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Lords of Finance, 1873 uncovers the first truly global financial crisis, funded by a frenzy of speculation and nation-building before spreading across markets, with devastating consequences.
1873 moves seamlessly between global forces and vivid human stories, bringing together bankers, politicians, intellectuals and families caught up in the crash, from the Rothschilds to Karl Marx and Mark Twain.
In revisiting this relatively unknown but profoundly consequential moment, 1873 is an urgent evocation of a key turning point in world history, with an extensive contemporary resonance.
Liaquat Ahamed graduated with degrees in economics from Cambridge and Harvard, worked at the World Bank in Washington, D.C., and had a twenty-five career as a professional investment manager based in London and New York before turning to writing. His first book, Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World, about the lead up to the 1929 Great Depression, won the Pulitzer Prize for History, the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Gold Medal, and the Financial Times Business Book of the Year Award. He is a trustee of the Putnam Funds, an adviser to the Rock Creek Group, and the Chair of the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference. He lives in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. with his wife Meena.
Off the Scales: The Inside Story of Ozempic and the Race to Cure Obesity by Aimee Donnellan, Fourth Estate (UK), St Martin's Press (US)
A ‘cure’ for obesity had long evaded the pharmaceutical industry, until the development of Ozempic. After decades of research, Ozempic has created an explosive, competitive and lucrative market for weight-loss injections. Financial investment has skyrocketed and public demand continues to soar alongside celebrity endorsements.
Through original reporting and rigorous research, Aimee Donnellan uncovers the complicated history of this world-altering medical breakthrough, while raising difficult questions about inequality, morality, beauty ideals and the pursuit of thinness. She forecasts the future of GLP-1s and examines what their explosive popularity tells us about our ideals of beauty and the lengths to which people will go in order to become thin. Donnellan profiles the scientist whose contributions to the discovery of GLP-1 were overlooked, documents her fight for recognition, and offers new insights into how food and beauty industries made billions while promoting unhealthy and unrealistic body image standards and accelerating the obesity crisis. She also provides firsthand accounts of several early Ozempic users and the transformative effect the drug has had on their weight loss journeys.
Aimee Donnellan is a columnist at Reuters, where her reporting has focused on the pharmaceutical, airline, and insurance industries since 2017. Previously she was the Sunday Times banking correspondent, and covered the bond market for the International Financing Review. She holds degrees in English and History from the University of Ireland, Galway, and in journalism from the London School of Journalism. She lives in Galway with her wife and two children. Off the Scales is her first book.
The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind and the Quest for Superintelligence by Sebastian Mallaby, Allen Lane (UK), Penguin Press (US)
From one of our leading chroniclers of the intersection of innovation and capitalism, a landmark reckoning - based on unprecedented access - with one of the world’s most brilliant and driven tech visionaries, and his game-changing company
For the past three years, Sebastian Mallaby has had unprecedented access to Hassabis and DeepMind, conducting hundreds of hours of interviews with him and his inner circle as well as detractors and rivals at other companies. The result is a revelation-packed portrait of a singular mind and a historic reckoning with the AI revolution.
As Mallaby chronicles, DeepMind is locked in an arms race with Silicon Valley competitors to build artificial general intelligence, and thereby become the keeper of humanity’s future. But unlike his rivals, Hassabis’ aims are not wealth and power but scientific enlightenment. He aims to control the technology, but the technology may ultimately control him – and humanity writ large.
Sebastian Mallaby is the author of several books, including the bestselling More Money Than God and The Man Who Knew, which won the Financial Times Business Book of the Year in 2016. A former Financial Times contributing editor and two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, Mallaby is the Paul A. Volcker Senior Fellow for International Economics at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Project Maven: A Marine Colonel, His Team, and the Dawn of AI Warfare by Katrina Manson, W.W. Norton (UK & US)
In 2017, Marine colonel Drew Cukor assembled a covert Pentagon team to put AI at the heart of American warfare. This book tells the definitive story of how that mission recruited Silicon Valley, supercharged Palantir's growth and deployed algorithms from Amazon and Microsoft into active combat. Today, Maven's AI-enabled systems operate in every branch of the American military to analyse intelligence and identify targets. Drawing on over 200 interviews, Katrina Manson examines the corporate and military forces reshaping modern war and asks whether AI will improve precision on the battlefield or unleash catastrophic, unaccountable errors at machine speed.
Katrina Manson is an award–winning Bloomberg reporter who covers cyber, emerging tech and national security. Her investigations exposed details of the US military’s AI use and US–China rivalry. She was previously the Financial Times US foreign policy and defence correspondent. Born and raised in London, she now lives in Washington, D.C.
Blood Will Flow: The Murderous Business of Oil and Gas by Alex Perry, Ithaka Press, (UK)
In 2021, 500 ISIS militants attacked the small, paradise beach town of Palma, strategically unimportant but for vast offshore gas fields. Five years on, Alex Perry’s reconstruction of events unearths an unprecedented fiasco. Woven into his account is a search for the truth about how energy companies really make their profits. His investigation takes him around the world, from Europe to the US, and back to Africa again.
Propulsive, prophetic, and arriving at a time when energy companies imperil the planet, Blood Will Flow delivers a morality tale for the global economy, and an inspiring quest for justice.
Alex Perry's prize-winning journalism has appeared in The New Yorker, Outside, The Economist, National Geographic, Harper's, The Guardian, TIME, Newsweek, The Sunday Times magazine and others. His work on Mozambique has won a George Polk award and a True Story award. He is the author of The Good Mothers, The Rift, Falling Off The Edge, and Lifeblood. Born in Philadelphia and raised in England, Perry spent fifteen years reporting from Asia and Africa. He now lives in Hampshire, England.
Prophecy: Prediction, Power and the Fight for the Future, from Ancient Oracles to AI by Carissa Véliz, Swift (UK), Doubleday (US)
In this powerful, refreshing new look at the many ways prediction shapes our everyday lives, Oxford professor Carissa Véliz explains how putting too much stock in others’ predictions makes us vulnerable to charlatans, con artists, dubious technology, and self-deception.
Examining a wide range of subjects both personal and societal, including medicine, climate, technology, society, and others, Véliz uncovers a number of insights: predictions about humans tend to be self-fulfilling; more data doesn’t guarantee better outcomes; AI is more likely to increase risk than decrease it; and a free and robust society requires not more prediction, but better preparation.
Carissa Véliz is an associate professor at the Institute for Ethics in AI at the University of Oxford. Her first book, Privacy Is Power was an Economist book of the year and has been published in seven languages. Her academic work has been published in The Harvard Business Review, Nature, AI & Society, and The American Journal of Bioethics, among others. She is the author of the forthcoming The Ethics of Privacy and Surveillance and the editor of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Digital Ethics.