April 9th 2018 in News

2018 Cundill History Prize opens for submissions

Submissions are now open for the $75,000 Cundill History Prize, which recognizes and rewards the best history writing in English.

Administered by McGill University in Montreal, the international prize awards the richest purse in non-fiction in English, with the winner receiving US$75,000, and the two runners up being awarded a ‘Recognition of Excellence Award’, together with US$10,000 each. It seeks the book that embodies historical scholarship, originality, literary quality and broad appeal. 

The Cundill History Prize relaunched in 2017, its 10th anniversary year, to become the world’s most prominent champion of history writing – with a significant lift in visibility, a record number of submissions, and widespread media coverage in Canada, the US and the UK. 

Submissions are now open until June 1, 2018 for books published in English between June 1, 2017 and May 31, 2018. Publishers may submit titles published in English from any country in the world, regardless of the nationality or place of residence of their authors. Translations are warmly welcomed. The winner will be announced at the Cundill History Prize awards ceremony in Montreal on November 15, 2018. 

Last year, the jury chaired by Margaret MacMillan awarded the prize to the British historian Daniel Beer for The House of the Dead: Siberian Exile Under the Tsars (Allen Lane), his ground-breaking study of Siberian penal colonies. The US-based Austrian Walter Scheidel and the Université du Québec à Montréal professor Christopher Goscha were the runners up.

The 2018 winner will join an impressive list of alumni including Stuart B. Schwartz (2008), Lisa Jardine (2009), Diarmaid MacCulloch (2010), Sergio Luzzatto (2011), Stephen Platt (2012), Anne Applebaum (2013), Gary Bass (2014), Susan Pedersen (2015), and Thomas W. Laqueur (2016).

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