Australian writer Richard Flanagan has won Britain’s leading nonfiction book prize, a decade after being awarded the Booker Prize for fiction.

Richard Flanagan, who won the Booker Prize for fiction in 2014, has become the first author in history to achieve the “unprecedented double” after being named the winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize for non-fiction.

Richard Flanagan has won the Baillie Gifford Prize for non-fiction for Question 7, a work that is part history and part memoir, which the judges described as a “meditative symphony of a book”. It is the first time in its 26-year history that the UK’s leading non-fiction prize has been awarded to an author who has also won the Booker Prize.

Richard Flanagan has become the first author in history to win both the Booker Prize for Fiction and the Baillie Gifford Prize for non-fiction.