Cundill History Prize, a $103K global prize for history writing, unveils 15 book longlist
Prize is administered by McGill University, winner will be announced on Oct. 30
Fifteen books that cover vastly different time periods and locations have made the longlist for the 2025 Cundill History Prize.
The $75,000 US (approx. $102,931 Cdn) prize annually recognizes the best historical nonfiction work of the year, which exhibits literary excellence and broad appeal. It is administered by McGill University in Montreal and is open to books about any historical period or subject, by authors of all nationalities from across the world.
Jury chair Ada Ferrer said in a press statement that the books on the longlist "combine superb writing with rigorous and imaginative craft to tackle topics and questions of lasting, sometimes urgent significance."
From the German Peasant's War of 1524, to 1960s Soviet dissidents and the Haitian revolution in the 1970s, the books on the longlist span continents and generations.
"They range widely not only in geographic and temporal scope, but also in method: from sweeping narrative history and biography, to close reading of legal texts, photographs, and dance cards, even to a fascinating walk in a postcolonial city as means to understand an unwritten history, centuries old," Ferrer said. "The result is a list of 15 singular books that represent the calibre and diversity of history writing today."
There are no Canadians on the longlist.
Harvard professor Tiya Miles, who won the award in 2022 for All that She Carried, is longlisted again for Night Flyer, which dives deeper into Harriet Tubman's story and weaves it into the context of our world.
The complete longlist is as follows:
- Disrupted City: Walking the Pathways of Memory and History in Lahore by Manan Ahmed Asif
- Wages for Housework: The Story of a Movement, an Idea, a Promise by Emily Callaci
- A Fractured Liberation: Korea Under US Occupation by Kornel Chang
- Black Convicts: How Slavery Shaped Australia by Santilla Chingaipe
- The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe by Marlene L. Daut
- Against Constitutional Originalism: A Historical Critique by Jonathan Gienapp
- America, América: A New History of the New World by Greg Grandin
- Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People by Tiya Miles
- To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement by Benjamin Nathans
- How the World Made the West: A 4,000 Year History by Josephine Quinn
- Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery by Seth Rockman
- Summer of Fire and Blood: The German Peasants' War by Lyndal Roper
- The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life by Sophia Rosenfeld
- The Girl in the Middle: A Recovered History of the American West by Martha A. Sandweiss
- Across the Green Sea: Histories from the Western Indian Ocean, 1440–1640 by Sanjay Subrahmanyam
The longlist was selected by Ferrer and the other jurors, historians and writers Sunil Amrith, François Furstenberg, Afua Hirsch and Francesca Trivellato.
The shortlist will be announced in early September, the finalists in early October and the winner on Oct. 30.
Last year's winner was American author Kathleen DuVal for Native Nations: A Millennium in North America.
Other previous winners include, Tania Branigan, Marjoleine Kars, Camilla Townsend, Julia Lovell and Maya Jasanoff.
