Kathleen DuVal at the Cundill History Prize’s 2024 winner’s ceremony in Montreal. Image: CHP, Owen Egan
By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson
‘This Huge, Sweeping History’
Overnight at Montreal’s Windsor Ballroom, the 2024 Cundill History Prize has been awarded to Kathleen DuVal for Native Nations: A Millennium in North America from Penguin Random House.Her book is the product of a 25-year project, and, as the Cundill program writes, “shows how long before colonization, Indigenous peoples adapted to climate change and instability with innovation, forming smaller communities and egalitarian government structures with complex economies which spread across North America.
“Challenging dominant narratives, DuVal refutes the theory that the arrival of Europeans led to the end of Indigenous civilizations in North America. Instead, she reveals the interactions and complex relationships that developed between nations.”
The complexity of those relationships is acutely evident in this week’s political dynamics in the States.
Earlier in the day on Wednesday (October 30), before the Cundill ceremony, an Associated Press article by Megan Janetsky and Rodrigo ABD outlined the potential power still vested in a first nation like the Navaho, which in Arizona could bring as many as 420,000 Native citizens to the ballot boxes for the November 5 election.
In Native Voters Could Swing US Elections, But They’re Asking Politicians: What Have You Done for Us? Janetsky and ABD write, “The Native vote has power, because they’re able to decide the next presidential election. Everybody knows that it’s going to come down to 15,000 or so votes in Arizona,” said Jacqueline De León, a voting rights attorney with the Native American Rights Fund and member of the Isleta Pueblo.” And AP’s analysis has indicated that in 2020, Native Americans, “who make up 5.2 percent of Arizona—saw a surge in turnout, voting in large numbers for the Democratic Party.”
‘Within Their Own Scholarship’
Rana Mitter
In his statement of rationale for the jury’s decision, the panel’s chair, Rana Mitter, said, “One of the most wonderful things about Native Nations by Katheleen DuVal is that it brings unexpected and, to many readers, unknown aspects of that story, to prominence.
“She does this by bringing in historians and analysts of the Indigenous American experience from within their own scholarship, bringing the story to the forefront of our wider understanding in this huge sweeping history that starts more than 1000 years ago and brings us up to the present day.”
Below, we revisit the Cundill History Prize’s finalists. DuVal’s shortlisted fellows, Gary J. Bass for Judgement at Tokyo and Dylan C. Penningroth for Before the Movement, were each awarded US$10,000.
At the October 20 Cundill History Prize ceremony in Montreal. Image: CHP, Owen Egan
The Cundill History Prize 2024 Shortlist
| Author | Title | Publisher / Imprint |
| Gary J. Bass | Judgment at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia | Pan Macmillan / Picador |
| Kathleen DuVal | Native Nations: A Millennium in North America | Penguin Random House |
| Dylan C. Penningroth | Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights | WW Norton / Liveright |
What Is the Market Impact of a Cundill Win?
As a point of interest—and using US dollars as our currency because the Cundill pays its especially generous winnings in American dollars—it’s worth considering that the Cundill and other awards programs working in nonfiction, frequently are handling some of the most expensive books published by the trade onto the English-language markets.
Consumers, whose attention is, after all, the target of these awards’ efforts to increase visibility, are asked by the nonfiction awards to consider some of the longest and costliest reads in the teeming world of so many prize programs.
The Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction in the United Kingdom, another of the world industry’s leading nonfiction awards, has committed to produce and report just such data on its wins’ impact on sales, and it will on October 10 announce its 2024 shortlist. Many in publishing might like to see the Cundill History Prize follow suit, and consider reporting on the market effect of its top honor, as well.
The 2024 Jury
Joining broadcaster and historian Rana Mitter on the jury panel this year are:
- New York University professor Nicole Eustace
- New York Times health reporter and Poynter fellow Stephanie Nolen
- Vanderbilt University professor Moses Ochonu
- Indiana University-Bloomington and Hutton Honors College dean Rebecca L. Spring
Previous Winning Authors of the Cundill History Prize
- Tania Branigan (2023)
- Tiya Miles (2022)
- Marjoleine Kars (2021)
- Camilla Townsend (2020)
- Julia Lovell (2019)
- Maya Jasanoff (2018)
- Daniel Beer (2017)
- Thomas W. Laqueur (2016)
- Susan Pedersen (2015)
- Gary Bass (2014)
- Anne Applebaum (2013)
- Stephen Platt (2012)
- Sergio Luzzatto (2011)
- Diarmaid MacCulloch (2010)
- Lisa Jardine (2009)
- Stuart B. Schwartz (2008)
Peter Cundill
Peter Cundill
The Cundill History Prize was founded by Peter Cundill (1938-2011), who was the founder of the Cundill Value Fund. He established the Cundill History Prize in 2008, two years after being diagnosed with Fragile X Tremor/Ataxia Syndrome, with which he died in London.
In a comment on the longlist’s release this year, Lisa Shapiro, dean of the faculty of arts at Montreal’s McGill University—the seat of the Cundill program—is quoted, saying, “The jury for the 2024 Cundill History Prize has done outstanding work in arriving at a longlist of 13 titles from a very competitive field, representing the very best in historical writing and scholarship.
“These books also highlight the range of new perspectives on both past events and our present context afforded by high-quality history.”
More from Publishing Perspectives on the Cundill History Prize is here. More on the international industry’s publishing and book awards is here, more on the Canadian book market is here, and more on nonfiction is here.