‘Bad Blood’ wins 2018 Business Book of the Year

Wednesday, 14 November 2018 Books+Publishing

In the UK, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup (Picador) by investigative journalist John Carreyou has won the 2018 Financial Times (FT) and McKinsey & Company Business Book of the Year Award.

Bad Blood, which was chosen from a shortlist of six to receive the £30,000 (A$54,140) award, explores the collapse of multi-billion dollar biotech company Theranos and the disgrace of its CEO, Elizabeth Holmes. The company failed after it was exposed that its supposedly revolutionary blood-testing technology didn’t work. Since the publication of Bad Blood, Holmes has been charged with fraud and Theranos has been dissolved.

The judges said Bad Blood ‘raised questions not only about the culture at one start-up—at its high point valued at more than $9 billion (A$12.5bn)—but in the whole of Silicon Valley’. FT editor and chair of judges Lionel Barber added that the book is ‘a brilliant piece of enterprise journalism’ that ‘reads at times like a thriller’.

Launched in 2005, the Business Book of the Year Award goes to the book that provides the ‘most compelling and enjoyable insight into modern business issues, including management, finance and economics’.

Andrew Leon Power won the £15,000 (A$27,070) Bracken Bower Prize for the best proposal for a business book by an author aged under 35. His proposal examines how entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial ideas emerge from refugee communities.

Last year Amy Goldstein became the first solo woman in the prize’s history to win the award for her book Janesville (S&S). For more information about the prize, visit the FT website.

Category: Awards International news