“Arriving at a list of three superb finalists required making difficult judgments and fine distinctions. Still harder judgments remain, as these three books differ markedly from the other two in scope and approach. What they share is the imagination, craft, and modulated passion that underlie all lasting creative achievement.”
J.R. McNeill
2022 Chair of the Jury
“[These three finalists] demonstrate that if we are to overcome the immense political, social and economic challenges we currently face, we need to seek the advice of great historians. Their research methods are uniformly thorough and in each case innovative. Their narrative drive is spirited and their conclusions revelatory."
Misha Glenny
2022 Juror
“These books remind us that the scale of a historian’s storytelling ambition can extend from the intimacy of a mother and daughter, to the vexed closeness of two nations and the lasting consequences of one man’s politics for the next generation. (...) These are books of consequence that have earned an enduring place on our bookshelves and in our thinking.”
Martha S. Jones
2022 Juror
Ada Ferrer's Cuba: An American History provides us with a front-row seat as we witness the evolution of the modern nation, with its dramatic record of conquest and colonization, of slavery and freedom, of independence and revolutions made and unmade.
READ an extract from Cuba: An American History via prize partner Literary Hub
LISTEN to a podcast interview with Ada Ferrer via prize partner History Extra
Ada Ferrer is Julius Silver Professor of History and Latin American and Caribbean Studies at New York University, where she has taught since 1995.
She is the author of Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868–1898, winner of the Berkshire Book Prize for the best first book by a woman in any field of history, and Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution, which won the Frederick Douglass Book Prize from the Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale University as well as multiple prizes from the American Historical Association.
Born in Cuba and raised in the United States, she has been traveling to and conducting research on the island since 1990.
ORDER your copy of Cuba: An American History from prize partner indigo
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Tiya Miles traces the life of a single object handed down through three generations of Black women to craft an extraordinary testament to people who are left out of the archives. All That She Carried honours the creativity and fierce resourcefulness of people who preserved family ties even when official systems refused to do so.
READ an extract from All That She Carried via prize partner Literary Hub
LISTEN to a podcast interview with Tiya Miles via prize partner History Extra
Tiya Miles is professor of history, Radcliffe Alumnae Professor at the Harvard-Radcliffe Institute, and director of the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University.
She is the author of All That She Carried, which was awarded the National Book Awarded for Nonfiction in 2021. She is a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship, and the Hiett Prize in the Humanities from the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture.
Miles is also the author of The Dawn of Detroit, which won the Frederick Douglass Book Prize and an American Book Award, among other honors, as well as the acclaimed books Ties That Bind, The House on Diamond Hill, The Cherokee Rose: A Novel of Gardens and Ghosts, and Tales from the Haunted South, a published lecture series.
ORDER your copy of All That She Carried from prize partner indigo
ORDER your copy of All That She Carried from prize partner bookshop.org
A major study of the collapse of the Soviet Union, showing how Gorbachev’s misguided reforms led to its demise, Vladislav Zubok's Collapse sheds new light on Russian democratic populism, the Baltic struggle for independence, the crisis of Soviet finances - and the fragility of authoritarian state power.
READ an extract from Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union via prize partner Literary Hub
LISTEN to a podcast interview with Vladislav Zubok via prize partner History Extra
Available later this year.
Vladislav M. Zubok is professor of international history at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is the author of A Failed Empire, Zhivago’s Children, and The Idea of Russia.
ORDER your copy of Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union from prize partner indigo
ORDER your copy of Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union from prize partner bookshop.org