Kathleen DuVal, historian of indigenous America, has been announced as the 2024 winner of the Cundill Prize for History for Native Nations: A Millennium in North America. As far as I can tell, DuVal is not indigenous, but the citation says she has been working on its account of a thousand years of indigenous history in North America for over twenty-five years.
Runners-up were Gary J. Bass for Judgment at Tokyo, on the post World War Two trial of Japanese war crimes, and Dylan Pennington for Before the Movement, on antecedents to the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s.
I'm not reviewing the Cundill shortlist for the Literary Review of Canada this year, so you will have to form your own opinions of these works.
For consolation, here's one of my previous group reviews, on a particularly interesting (I thought) group of histories.
Update, November 6: I have to dissent from Ken White's recent suggestion, in his ever-lively booktrade SubStack "ShuSh," that the Cundill Prize is too academically-insular and needs more input from generalist nonfiction writers/jurors. Generalist nonfiction writer that I am at heart, I have to say nonfiction book prizes are a dime a dozen, even in Canada. Big, ambitious, deeply researched historical writing need the kind of attention that major book prizes can provide. The Cundill is one of the few in the world that hits that niche. There was a journalistic tilt to last year's nominees, and it was not their best year.
