Shortlist set to be announced

The shortlist for the inaugural £30,000 Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award will be announced on September 20 at 9.30am BST on this website.

The award has attracted entries from across the spectrum of recently published works on business, finance, management and economics and the judges will select up to six. The winner will be named at a gala ceremony in London on November 21. The award – the only one of its kind – will go to the book that provides “the most compelling and enjoyable insight into modern business issues”.

The “long list” of books now being read by the judges is confidential, but it includes fast-paced business narratives, to-the-point management handbooks, and sweeping analyses of the world economy. Books published since October 31, 2004 are eligible for the £30,000 first prize, but the award is also open to books that are scheduled for publication any time up to November 1 this year.

The judges for the prize include Lloyd Blankfein, Goldman Sachs’ president and chief operating officer, Jeffrey Garten, dean of Yale School of Management, Rachel Lomax, deputy governor for monetary policy at the Bank of England, N.R. Narayana Murthy, chairman and chief mentor of Infosys Technologies and Sir Martin Sorrell, chief executive of WPP. Andrew Gowers, the FT’s editor, and John Gapper, chief business commentator, will represent the newspaper.

Meanwhile, Financial Times readers have been using the dedicated website to post their own comments on their favourite business books of all time. Among their suggestions are Tom Peters’ Re-Imagine! (“an absolute standout”), C.K. Prahalad’s The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid (”amazing case studies”) and Clayton Christensen’s Seeing What’s Next (a book that ”truly helps decision-makers”).

The prize was launched in April with a series of breakfast briefings for publishers in London and New York. As Andrew Gowers put it at the time: “Our main hope is that the prize will encourage even sharper and more entertaining writing on the subjects FT readers and Goldman Sachs clients consider important…. [It] is, if nothing else, a spur to writers to raise their game”.