The Cundill History Prize has revealed its 2025 longlist, with 15 books in the running for the award given to “a work of history written or translated into English.”
Tiya Miles was longlisted for Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for biography. Miles won the Cundill History Prize in 2022 for All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake.
Greg Grandin was nominated for America, América: A New History of the New World, as were Manan Ahmed Asif for Disrupted City: Walking the Pathways of Memory and History in Lahore; Emily Callaci for Wages for Housework: The Story of a Movement, an Idea, a Promise; Kornel Chang for A Fractured Liberation: Korea Under US Occupation; Santilla Chingaipe for Black Convicts: How Slavery Shaped Australia; Marlene L. Daut for The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe; and Jonathan Gienapp for Against Constitutional Originalism: A Historical Critique.
Also making the longlist were Benjamin Nathans for To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement; Josephine Quinn for How the World Made the West: A 4,000 Year History; Seth Rockman for Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery; Lyndal Roper for Summer of Fire and Blood: The German Peasants’ War; Sophia Rosenfeld for The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life; Martha A. Sandweiss for The Girl in the Middle: A Recovered History of the American West; and Sanjay Subrahmanyam for Across the Green Sea: Histories From the Western Indian Ocean, 1440–1640.
The Cundill History Prize was first awarded in 2008. Previous winners include Anne Applebaum for Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1945–1956and Kathleen DuVal for Native Nations: A Millennium in North America.
The shortlist for this year’s award will be announced in early September, with the winner revealed on October 30 at a festival in Montreal.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
