The 18th cycle of the Montreal-based Cundill History Award opens with the release of a 15-title longlist.

By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson

‘Lasting, Sometimes Urgent Significance’

Canada’s Cundill History Prize today (July 28) is announcing its 2025 longlist, a roster of 15 titles. The program’s shortlist is to follow in September; with its “finalists” in early October; and an announcement of who will be its 18th winner on October 30.

The Cundill is based at Montreal’s McGill University but issues its purse in American currency, with US$75,000 (CAN$102,708) to the winner and US$10,000 (CAN$13,694) to two runners-up.

For context, the Cundill’s nearest neighbors in the vigorously contested nonfiction and/or history-writing field of book awards include:

• The £50,000 (US$67,169) Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction (United Kingdom)
• The £50,000 (US$67,169) Wolfson History Prize (United Kingdom)
• The £30,000 (US$40,302) Women’s Prize for Nonfiction (opened in 2024, United Kingdom)
• The £25,000 (US$33,585) British Academy Book Prize (United Kingdom)
• The £25,000 (US$33,585) Royal Society (Trevedi) Science Book Prize (United Kingdom)
• The €25,000 (US$29,366) German Nonfiction Prize (Germany)
• The €25,000 (US$29,366) Peace Prize of the German Book Trade (Germany)

Of course, there are several other award programs that include nonfiction among multiple other categories. But the Cundill’s closest cousins are focused on nonfiction and/or history with a goal of illuminating elements of today’s political, economic, social, climate, and other issues.

“These are among the most valuable book contests in the industry—not least because they attempt to connect readers with seriously relevant work.”

An interesting like-minded program is the States’ US$35,000 Aspen Words Literary Prize, which works in fiction but for the purpose of awarding “an influential book that illuminates a vital contemporary issue and demonstrates the transformative power of literature on thought and culture.”

And these are among the most valuable book contests in the industry—not least because they attempt to connect readers with seriously relevant work. They follow literature that speaks to a troubled world, and they don’t have to account, as well, for the many genres of fiction and other sectors.

This is what Cundill jury chair Ada Ferrer calls “lasting, sometimes urgent significance.” Ferrer is the Dayton-Stockton professor of history at Princeton. She was a Cundill finalist, herself, in 2022, for Cuba: An American History from Scribner.

In a comment for today’s release of the longlist, she says, “The 15 titles on this year’s longlist combine superb writing with rigorous and imaginative craft to tackle topics and questions of lasting, sometimes urgent significance.

“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, [and] even to a fascinating walk in a postcolonial city as means to understand an unwritten history, centuries old. The result is a list of 15 singular books that represent the caliber and diversity of history writing today.”

Many who follow the Cundill will note that Yale’s Tiya Miles has returned to the longlist this year, following her 2022 Cundill win for her highly regarded All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake from Penguin Random House, a book that also won the United States’ National Book Award in Nonfiction in 2021.

Last year’s Cundill winner, Kathleen DuVal, is to give her Cundill Lecture on October 29 during the annual Cundill History Prize Festival in Montreal. DuVal’s 2024 win was for  Native Nations: A Millennium in North America from Penguin Random House.

The Cundill History Prize 2025 Longlist

Author	Title	Publisher / Imprint
Manan Ahmed Asif	Disrupted City: Walking the Pathways of Memory and History in Lahore	The New Press
Emily Callaci	Wages for Housework: The Story of a Movement, an Idea, a Promise	Penguin Random House/Allen Lane
Kornel Chang	A Fractured Liberation: Korea Under US Occupation	Harvard University/Belknap Press
Santilla Chingaipe	Black Convicts: How Slavery Shaped Australia	Simon & Schuster/ Scribner Australia
Marlene L. Daut	The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe	Penguin Random House/Alfred A. Knopf
Jonathan Gienapp	Against Constitutional Originalism: A Historical Critique	Yale University Press
Greg Grandin	America, América: A New History of the New World	Penguin Random House/Penguin Press
Tiya Miles	Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People	Penguin Random House/Penguin Press
Benjamin Nathans	To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement	Princeton University Press
Josephine Quinn	How the World Made the West: A 4,000-Year History	Penguin Random House/Random House
Seth Rockman	Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery	University of Chicago Press
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
Martha A. Sandweiss	The Girl in the Middle: A Recovered History of the American West	Princeton University Press
Sanjay Subrahmanyam	Across the Green Sea: Histories from the Western Indian Ocean, 1440–1640	Saqi Books

The 2025 Cundill Jury

Ada 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 Princeton’s 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.

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.

What Is the Market Impact of a Cundill Win?

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 to consider some of the longest and costliest reads, in part to help support the kind of research and time that goes into many of them. (DuVal’s win last year on Native Nations, was the product of a 25-year project.)

Both the Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction and the British Academy Book Prize (from our list of these awards above), have committed to produce and report the type of data that is offered to the various news media by the Booker Prize Foundation for its flagship Booker Prize for Fiction and its International Booker Prize. Seeing how print runs are affected, how sales accelerate, and how rights sales, translations, and territories multiply for a winner is helpful in demonstrating the value of awards in the business to authors, publishers, booksellers, and consumers.

Many in publishing might like to see the Cundill History Prize join this effort, so that the ability of this awards program to help generate visibility and sales in an important sector of the book business is evident to professional industry players, to writers, and to readers.

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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.