National Business Book Award: Leading cryptocurrency book to beat Business Insider boss

Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Carney will be attending this year’s meeting of the Bank of England

The chair of the Bank of England and the Wall Street Journal’s deputy publisher have been named joint winners of the 2018 National Business Book Award.

James Booth and Stephen Bown’s latest work on the new generation of cryptocurrency has been given the prestigous £10,000 prize.

“XRP is going to change the world,” says Booth, co-editor of the Journal’s Crypto Weekly.

Now in its 13th year, the prize, aimed at highlighting the best work on business in the UK, is sponsored by the government agency, and first offered in 2003.

Special congratulations to Stephen Bown, deputy publisher at Wall Street Journal Books, and James Booth, who is currently overseeing the cryptocurrency division of the London Stock Exchange. We are proud to recognise their distinction in the world of business and finance. #NBBA2018 @UKBusiness @r3uk pic.twitter.com/dIb4pkEV1C — Minister for Small Business Miles Celic (@MilesCelic) August 7, 2018

The winner had to be a first-time author who had published only once before – Bown for The Crypto Prize, and Booth for XRP: Untangling the web from the smallest step to the largest order.

Both are economists based in the United States.

Speakers this year

Speaking about this year’s winning authors, Business Secretary Greg Clark praised “their stellar contributions to the thought-provoking debates that are driving the future of business”.

He added: “In doing so, they bring interesting perspectives to the issues we are facing, and demonstrate why they are experts in their fields.”

This is the third year since the winner and runner-up were split, meaning there will be a two-way race for the 2018 inaugural prize.

The runner-up, Richard A. Sharp and Alfred Paul Stearns’ business book, Scaling Up, points the way forward for companies in the age of multi-disciplined organisations.

Biographies of those going head-to-head

Also being awarded this year is the £3,000 gold prize which is for the most interesting biography on a business leader.

Which book – the best by weight?

Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Those books on business leaders will be split in the face of two joint winners

The finalists for that prize are: Lisa Greenwood’s What Does It Mean to Be British? (336 pages, Hill and Wang, hardback £28.00), The New Entrepreneurs, by Krishnendu Majumdar (190 pages, Faber & Faber, hardback £20.00), and Ruth Collins’ Not Taking the Next Step? The Journey of a Women in Business (176 pages, Granta, paperback £15.00).

A finalist is to be announced on Friday.

Tim Montgomerie, the editor of ConservativeHome, chaired the judging panel, with the other members of the panel coming from the academic, journalistic and literary worlds:

Barbara Deutscher, the Director of the Initiative for Global Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the London School of Economics and Political Science

Philip Whyte, the professor of history at Oxford University and chair of the Media Review Committee at King’s College London

Simon Jenkins, the editor of the Guardian

Paul Mason, a journalist on BBC Newsnight and former BBC economics editor

What’s the record?

Josiah Mortimer, the chairman of the judges for the second time, highlighted one of the striking things about this year’s book was that “a business book would be considered “quite good” – bold, bolder than any other in many years”.

Chaired by the editor of the Financial Times’s Taster, and edited by Alastair Sims, the award has previously been won by authors’ diaries or memoirs and by those who wrote prose papers.

Past winners include Martin Wolf, then of the Financial Times, on his career in economics; the academic Jane Jacobs and the architect of the Channel Tunnel Howard Hughes.

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