Image: Cundill History Prize
By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson
Book and Publishing Contest News This Month:
The £30,000 FT Schroders Business Book 2025 Shortlist
The £50,000 Booker Prize for Fiction’s 2025 Shortlist
The British Audio Awards’ First Shortlists: Winners in November
The €25,000 German Book Prize 2025 Shortlist
US National Book Awards: The 2025 Young People’s Literature Longlist
US National Book Awards: The 2025 Nonfiction Longlist
US National Book Awards: The 2025 Translated Literature Longlist
The £25,000 British Academy Book Prize: A 2025 Shortlist
Translation: First Winners of a New PEN-and-Booker Program
Longlist: The £50,000 Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction
The $75,000 Cundill History Prize Names a 2025 Shortlist
The Cundill Releases Its Even-Shorter-List
This is a proud program that seeks out “craft, communication, and consequence” in its effort to honor works of accessible, even revelatory, history writing. Canada’s Cundill History Prize hands its top winner a purse of US$75,000 (CAN$104,380). It also provides US$10,000 to each of two runners-up (CAN$13,919).
That winner and those two runners-up are being put into place in today’s (September 30) announcement, naming the Cundill’s three “finalists.”
As the international readership of Publishing Perspectives is well aware, most of the myriad book and publishing award contests clamoring for public attention tend to announce a longlist, a shortlist, and one or more winners.
The Cundill, however, goes in for this extra little round of attention, coming up with a third list—of three finalists—without offering a rationale for this extra step in markets so crowded with competition news. For that matter, it starts with deeper lists, too, including a 15-title longlist and an eight-title shortlist.
The two runners-up could, of course, be named at the time the winner is named during McGill University’s Cundill Festival (October 30.). They could then be identified as finalists and cheered for the excellence of their work, all at the same event—and in the same news cycle—as the winner is revealed and praised. On the other hand, maybe organizers have found that snagging the attention of contemporary markets for what may look like demanding reads attached to academic contexts requires an extra push in the press.
Whatever may be the thinking behind this third stage of pre-winner presentation, here are the three “finalists” from which a winner is to be drawn. The mechanics of the program’s process aside, the most valuable element of the Cundill’s operation happily remains in place: This is a prize that can be awarded to an author “anywhere in the world.” The internationalism of this program alone warrants respect.
The Cundill History Prize 2025 Finalists
| Author | Title | Publisher / Imprint |
| Marlene L. Daut | The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe | Penguin Random House / Alfred A. Knopf |
| Lyndal Roper |
Summer of Fire and Blood: The German Peasants’ War |
Hachette UK / John Murray Press |
| Sophia Rosenfeld | The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life | Princeton University Press |
Commentary on the Finalists
In her statement of rationale for this “even shorter list,” the jury chair, Ada Ferrer, is quoted today, saying, “It was not easy to get from a list of eight truly excellent books to a slate of only three finalists.
Ada Ferrer
“The books we selected speak to the extraordinary range and vibrancy of historical writing today. From a pathbreaking biography of a little understood Haitian king, to a masterful recreation of the German Peasants’ War of 1524—the largest popular uprising in Western Europe before the French Revolution—to an innovative exploration of how the idea and practices of choice have come to dominate modern life, all three books combine remarkable creativity, rigorous research, and engaging prose.
“These are wonderful books that deserve our attention and that will, I think, stand the test of time.”
The 2025 Cundill Jury
Ferrer is joined on the jury by:
- Sunil Amrith, the Renu and Anand Dhawan professor of history at Yale;
- François Furstenberg, a professor and the director of undergraduate studies at John Hopkins University;
- Afua Hirsch, a writer, author, filmmaker, and journalist; and
- Francesca Trivellato, the Andrew W. Mellon professor of early modern European history at the Institute of Advanced Study.
The panel reportedly worked from an initial pool of more than 400 submissions, the program saying that this is a record.
Previous Winning Authors of the Cundill History Prize
- Kathleen DuVal (2024)
- 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
The Cundill History Prize was established by Peter Cundill (1938-2011), who was the founder of the Cundill Value Fund. He was a native of Montreal, and took a bachelor’s degree in commerce in 1960 from McGill University, which would become—and remains—the seat of the Cundill History Prize. He would go on to have a career in investment management, opening Peter Cundill & Associates and the Cundill Value Fund.
Peter Cundill
He created the Cundill History Prize in 2008, originally with the name Cundill International Prize in History, to be “awarded annually to an author who has published a book determined to have a profound literary, social, and academic impact on the subject.”
Two years before the establishment of the Cundill Prize, he had been diagnosed with Fragile X Tremor/Ataxia Syndrome, with which he died in London at age 72.
More from Publishing Perspectives on the Cundill History Prize is here. More on the international industry’s myriad publishing and book awards is here, more on the Canadian book market is here, and more on nonfiction is here.
Wherever our international readers are in the world, they use our free daily email to be sure they don’t miss the news. Sign up now.