Prize Watch: Dafoe and Cundill longlists

It's getting to be book prize season, and both the John W. Dafoe Prize (Canadian) and the Cundill Prize (international)  have nominee lists out.  The Dafoe longlist is ten, the Cundill "shortlist" is eight.

The JW Dafoe Book Prize ("awarded to the best book on Canada, Canadians, and/or Canada’s place in the world published in the previous calendar year")  once again rather buries its longlist deep in its website -- but you can find it here.  in "news.  Last year's winner was Gerald Friesen's The Honorable John W. Norquay,

The Cundill Prize shortlist is here.  The Cundill, run by McGill University, with a mostly American jury and a prize of  $US75,000, is "awarded annually to the book that embodies historical scholarship, originality, literary quality and broad appeal."
There are a couple of Canadians in the running this year:  Jonathan Cheng for Shattered Messiah and Eric Jennings of the University of Toronto, for Vanilla.

We'll get back to these as the Dafoe shortlist and winner and the Cundill finalists and winner are announced.

Cundill Prize Shortlist

McGill University has announced the shortlist for the new Cundill Prize in History, the $75,000 prize for history books written and published in English or French anywhere in the world on any historical subject. It is funded by British financier Peter Cundill and run by his alma mater, McGill.

The titles and authors on the list are not exactly household names (even among households with a historian in them). So much so that I wondered if we had another instance of a prize conceived as a general reader's enthusiam (Cundill, a commerce grad, said when he created the prize that his main historical interest was reading biographies of Winston Churchill) being captured by academic special interests.

But in fact the jury is an interesting one, intriguingly diverse: writer Denise Chong, cultural politician Serge Joyal, Beaverbrook heir Tim Aitken (!), as well as the superb historian Natalie Zemon Davis and a couple of other professors unknown to me. One could quibble, but these are not academic logrollers.

It's still curious that none of these titles seem to have made any significant splash in the culture before their nominations, and that none of the authors are particularly prominent historians. But I find myself thinking of the immense challenge in considering all the eligible history books published in the world, let alone coming up with a shortlist that did not seem eccentric.

We should also salute the Cundill for coming up with a short shortlist: just three titles. Self-indulgent GG juries, with fourteen prizes covering much smaller topic areas, invariably dilute the honour of a nomination by coming up with five, sometimes six, titles for their shortlists.

Cundill Prize: Jardine's Going Dutch

A couple of years ago zillionaire Peter Cundill endowed a $75,000 international prize for "a book determined to have had (or likely to have) a profound literary, social and academic impact in the area of history."

Cundill, who himself won a prize for being "the greatest mutual fund manager of all time" (one hopes this means his customers can afford to endow prizes too), is a McGill alumni, and he asked the university to manage the prize for him.

That may have been ill-advised. One has the impression the university cares little and knows less about the management and promotion of a major literary prize -- compare the Cundill's impact to that of the Giller, which has one third the value (Correction later: two thirds) but has brilliant and dedicated backers.

So the announcement yesterday was a bit of a sleeper. The principal comment about it in the Globe & Mail yesterday was to question why the announcement was precisely timed to clash with the Siminovich arts prize, also being given in Montreal yesterday.

All of last year's nominees seemed like rather specialized studies largely unknown to the wider world of books, literature, and history. Of this year's, the best known was probably David Hackett Fisher's Champlain's Dream -- okay, it's the one I'd heard of, read actually. The winner announced yesterday was Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland's Glory, by British academic and critic Lisa Jardine -- which does indeed sound interesting. The Guardian Online, which covers British historical writing very extensively, had a short, enthusiastic review last February. It does not seem to be aware of the Cundill Prize, however.

It's still a new prize. Let's hope it finds its niche.

Prize Watch: Cundill Prize finalists

The finalists for the Cundill Prize in history have been announced by McGill University.

In September, the Cundill announced a longish shortlist, six titles and two honorable mentions, which usually suggests a weak, confused, or divided jury. And whereas it seemed the Cundlll was unabashedly a prize for the serious and scholarly, generally honouring 600-page blockbusters full of original scholarship on often obscure corners of world history, this year's shortlist seemed a bit newsier and more "pop" -- books you might have heard of anyway. The only one of the shortlisted titles I happen to have read, Black Count by the American journalist Tom Reiss, is a lively and interesting read on the rise and fall of novelist Alexandre Dumas's father, a Caribbean mulatto who became a Napoleonic general. But I hadn't thought of it as Cundill material.

This week came the announcement of three "finalists," putting three shortlist titles and both honourable mentions out of the running. The survivors are all highly credentialled academics, though two of the nominated works have been substantial bestsellers:
Anne Applebaum - Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956
Christopher Clark - The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went To War In 1914
Fredrik Logevall - Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam

Applebaum, a Pulitzer Prize winner in the past, teaches in Britain and writes for the Washington Post and Slate, and her Iron Curtain has been widely reviewed. Clark teaches at Cambridge, and Sleepwalkers has been getting a lot of attention in the runup to the First War centenary. Logevall teaches at Cornell, and he and his book may be the least well known of the finalists. The full Cundill release is here.

Those voted off the island were shortlister Lynne Olson - Those Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America's Fight Over World War II, 1939-1941, Tom Reiss - The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo, and ChristianCarylStrange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century. And the honourable mentions, Peter Brown's Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West and Yang Jisheng - Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962

Prize Watch: Cundill to Kathleen DuVal

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.

Prize Watch: Cundill History Prize 2016 even shorter list

AndreaWolf

The Cundill Prize for History does a dance of the veils each year: longlists, shortlists, finalists, winner.  They are at the second last stage now: a list of three finalists from which a winner will be announced on November 17:
The

Thomas W. Laqueur, a professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley, The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains, (Princeton University Press).

David Wootton, anniversary professor of history at the U.K.'s University of York, The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution, published by HarperCollins.

British design historian and broadcaster Andrea Wulf, The Invention of Nature: Alexander Von Humboldt's New World, (Alfred A. Knopf, John Murray Publishers).

It's not a list to conjure a lot of excitement, maybe. But you have to give the Cundill books room to work. Some prominent names (Mary Beard, Robert Gordon) got knocked off in the whittling-down, and some possible worthies (Jonathan Sumption) never made it. You look at these titles and say: a history of burial practices? another history of the scientific revolution?  But sometimes if you actually take up a Cundill nominee, you say, yeah, good historian, big topic, new ideas, I see what they are getting at. The freshest title may be Andrea Wolf's on Van Humboldt. But I ain't read any of them.

Cundill History prize shorterlist

The $75,000 Cundill Prize, now down to three nominees, will be announced on November 20. Still standing, should you want a lot of reading in the next week:

·         Gary Bass – The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger and a Forgotten Genocide (Knopf)

A horrifying story of the Pakistani state’s genocidal war on the people of Bangladesh – and America’s sad record of complicity.

·         Richard Overy – The Bombing War: Europe 1939-45* (Allen Lane)

An extraordinary survey of aerial warfare in every theater of World War II.

·         David Van Reybrouck – Congo: The Epic History of a People (ECCO)

An intensely personal examination of the self-destruction of the Congolese state.

From the Cundill press release:

The winner of the 2013 Cundill Prize was Anne Applebaum for Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956. On winning the prize, Applebaum said: “It’s wonderful that this prize is not just for ‘non-fiction’ but for well-written, deeply researched history, which is one of the most difficult and time-consuming literary forms that exists. It's also wonderful that the award is generous enough to be of real help to the historians who win it. I am enormously honored to have been last year’s laureate." 

Best histories of 2021 from various sources UPDATED

There's an list of impressive looking books in Smithsonian History's tally of the best American and world histories published in 2021.

And from Britain's History Today, another 2021 best-of list, this one assembled by asking a lot of historians about their personal choices for the year. No overlap with the Smithsonians. (I'd say consensus on "best history" is rare most years.)

Last week in Montreal, the Cundill History Prize, for the best recent history book in English, was awarded to Marjoleine Kars for Blood on the River: The Untold Story of the Berbice Slave Revolt. The Cundill short list and finalists are available here. I'm reviewing the final three for the Literary Review of Canada soon.

This blog should put its mind to the best Canadian histories of the year. Nominations gratefully received! Canada's History, online and in the mag, offers an extensive book and gift buyers' guide to things Canadiana. A subscription always makes a good gift.

Update, December 9:  A short smart Best Of list from Paul Lay, the very well informed editor of Britain's History Today magazine, has been published at the Five Books website. Finally, a hint of overlap in nominations: Lay includes Marie Favereau's The Horde: How the Mongols Changed the World, a finalist for the Cundill Prize. 

Five Books has a second Best History list: the shortlist of the Wolfson Prize for the best histories published in Britain for general readers  It includes Brit/Canadian Rebecca Clifford's: Survivors: Children's Lives after the Holocaust, the other title among the Cundill finalists. The Wolfson winner was Black Spartacus, a biography of Toussaint Louverture by Sudhir Hazareesingh.

Prize Watch: dining with the Cundills

Down last night to the Shangri-La Hotel in Toronto for the Cundill History Prize gala, thanks to friends at Walrus magazine who had a table to fill out.

Clearly we should all write Cundillable books, not just for the $75,000, but for the dinner, the wine, the occasion. I'm not sure I was really aware Toronto had a Shangri-La Hotel, but when I said where I was going, people said "Oooh," and they were right.

Historians were actually pretty thin on the ground. Apart from the nominees I spotted David Wilson of the DBC, and Antonia Maioni, Desmond Morton and Christopher Manfredi of McGill, but the crowd was mostly Toronto movers, shakers and McGill donors. (It was a very McGill event, actually.)

The Cundill came through, however, for the jury gave the prize to the most serious and uncompromising book on the shortlist: Thomas W. Laqueur of Princeton won for The Work of The Dead: A History of Mortal Remains.  A thousand or so pages on burial practices is probably not going to threaten the bestseller lists, but Cundill winners tend to be both demanding and pretty good. Or as the Globe&Mail puts it (rimshot!):

With his book The Work of the Dead, Thomas W. Laqueur is just killing it of late. His ambitious rumination on mortal remains had already won this year’s George L. Mosse Prize and the PROSE Award in European & World History too, and now it has captured McGill University’s august Cundill Prize, an international award for non-fiction that comes with a $75,000 (U.S.) cheque.

Reviews of the finalists may follow.

2019 Cundill Prize shortlist

The Cundill Prize, the Canadian-based, big $$$, international history prize announced its shortlist in Toronto on October 16. The list is indeed short (as shortlists should be): just three books, all by women historians.

• Mary Fulbrook, Reckonings: Legacies of Nazi Persecution and the Quest for Justice, published by Oxford University Press.
• Jill Lepore, These Truths: A History of the United States, published by W. W. Norton &, Company (US)
• Julia Lovell, Maoism: A Global History, published by The Bodley Head (in the UK),  and Knopf (in the US)

Winner to be announced November 14 in Montreal.

I don't know if this proves that the Cundill Prize is succeeding in its intent, but over the years I have been moved from time to time to read the winners and even some of the nominees for the prize.  I've generally been glad I did, even when many of them were 750 page books on subjects of world history that I knew nothing about.

Lepore is a Harvard prof but also a contributor of marvellous essays to the New Yorker, and her book has been a widely reviewed bestseller in the United States. The other authors and books are less well known.  Most years one or two books on the Cundill list have achieved some trade market success, but the jurors are generally willing to give the prize to serious academic works on fairly obscure topic when they feel like it.  Good thing too. (This year one  --at least! -- of the jurors is a sometime reader of this blog, but no inside information has come this way. )

Prize Watch: the Cundill Prize finalists.

Yesterday the Cundill Prize for History announced the final three for its 2020 prize, to be announced December 3. 

• William Dalrymple for The Anarchy, on the collapse of India's Mughal dynasty and the takeover of the subcontinent by the East India Company.
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• Vincent Brown for Tacky's Revolt: a mid-eighteenth century Jamaican slave revolt recast as a struggle with pan-Atlantic roots and outcomes.
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• Camilla Townsend for Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs.

I don't usually keep track of longlists, and the Cundill's ten this year was pretty long  -- though they called it the "shortlist." But quite a few intriguing titles were left behind when the finalists were chosen:  histories of India, Greece, and Palestine, the Iran-Saudi confrontation, "Indian Removal" in the United States, the collapse of Cromwell's Protectorate, and a biography of a little-known Black activist.  (There was an official longlist that was even longer, and still pretty interesting.)

How are the Cundill choices as a measure of what's doing in world historical writing? An anti-colonial slant to the choices, and five of ten shortlisters would count as "of colour," though American Ivy-League scholars feature prominently in both shortlist and finalists.

Prize Watch: Balsillie and the Cundill for Lorinc and Miles

Nice to see the Balsillie Prize for Public Policy presented by the Writers' Trust to veteran Toronto journalist and heritage and civic policy activist for his book Dream States: Smart Cities, Technology, and the Pursuit of Urban Utopias.  Good also to see the venerable small press Coach House getting the win along with its author.

Meanwhile the Cundill Prize in History was presented in Montreal last night to Tiya Miles for All That She Carried: The Journal of Ashley's Sack, a history based on a small fragment of material culture and its testimony to the horrors of slavery.  I'm doing a review of the Cundill shortlist and winner for the Literary Review of Canada, so I won't say more, but this is an intensely vivid and moving book for a work of history, (by a Harvard prof, no less). Miles is the first Black winner of the Cundill, I believe.

Prize Watch: the Cundill to Fifth Sun

From Montreal, the Cundill Prize in History today announced that the American historian Camilla Townsend has won the 2020 Cundill Prize for Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs.

I'm reviewing the Cundill finalists for a forthcoming issue of the Literary Review of Canada, so I think I'll save my thoughts. But you could do worse than ask for the shortlist books for Christmas.

Jeffrey Simpson leaks the Cundill nominees

The website for the Cundill Prize in history says the long list of nominees will be announced in Montreal on October 10.  But when you put a journalist on the jury..... Well, Jeffrey Simpson is one of the jury, and his column in the Globe and Mail announced the whole list last Saturday. Winner to be announced at the end of November.

As usual the Cundill list is international in subject matter and uncompromising in matters of form. No pop history here. Five of the six 2012 titles Simpson reveals focus on war; two of the six are by women. But I'm willling to bet there is some pretty substantial history here.

Some previous Cundill coverage here and here (this winner is huge, ambitious, and very readable, I can testify).

Cundill Prize

After a few years, the Cundill Prize (a work of history published anywhere in the world, on any subject: $75,000) seems to be learning a bit about promoting itself and its winners -- high profile juries, more media connections, etc. Sunday McGill University, which administers the prize, announced the 2010 winner is Diarmaid McCullough for A History of Christianity.

Apparently there's been a BBC TV series based on the book too.

Looking for some info, I was amused by the "review" in Britain's Telegraph that starts:

First let me say that I don’t think anyone is going to read this book. It’s 1,161 pages long, for goodness sake. If you missed out the “begat” bits, you could read the Bible in less time.

Christianity may be history, but the philistines are eternal. Compare Adam Gopnik from the Cundill announcement:

Though all of the books in the short list seemed to us wonderful works of narrative history – and well written, too -- MacCulloch’s stands out. If any book could truly fulfill the charge of the Cundill Prize – to make first class history more potent to a wide reading public, and above all to remind us that history, even three thousand years worth, matters – this one does.

Prize Watch: Cundill noms

The Cundill Prize, the big money Montreal-based international prize for historical writing, announced its 2016 (not very) long list. Six titles:

Mary Beard, SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome (Liveright Publishing Corporation)

Robert J. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War (Princeton University Press)

Thomas W. Laqueur, The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remain (Princeton University Press)

Philippe Sands, East West Street: On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)

David Wootton, The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution (Stuart Proffitt)

Andrea Wulf, The Invention of Nature: Alexander Von Humboldt’s New World (Alfred A. Knopf, John Murray Publishers)

Six titles.  Two women authors.  Probably more Eurocentric than some recent lists.  History of science, cultural history, economic history, classics, a little politics....

One of the things I admire about the Cundill lists is frequently I have never heard of most of the nominees. This year I've actually read most of one of them (SPQR kinda disappointed me by the end) and am roughly familiar with a couple of others from reviews and discussions. Still, there looks to be a lot of new stuff here, if you like big challenging histories.

The jury meanwhile seems to be getting more "democratic:" i.e, fewer historians. I'm probably okay with that in principle, at least:

• Timothy James Brook, Republic of China Chair, University of British Columbia;
• John Darwin, Professor of Global and Imperial History; Director, Oxford Centre for Global History , University of Oxford;
• David Frum, Senior Editor, The Atlantic;
• Anna Porter, Co-founder, Key Porter Books

GG and Cundill Prize shortlist 2018

More memoir than history on the shortlist for the 2018 Governor-General's Award in nonfiction, an intriguing list released this morning, including a couple of books and authors I have heard some buzz about and some unknown to me.

The Cundillians

Getting more historical, the Cundill Prize, the Montreal based $75,000 prize for the world's best history book, recently released its longlist of nominated titles.  A shortlist of three will appear at the end of October, and a winner in November.

Meanwhile, here are the first-round Cundill contenders, and gee, this year, I have actually read one in advance and on my own initiative.

Hot Histories at the Cundill

I figure, who but the author cares about the tenth or fifteenth book on a "short" list? CBC Books had a twenty-five title shortlist recently.

But the Cundill Prize's short list (8 this year) is sometimes the most interesting thing it issues.  The Cundill goes looking for the best book about history published in English in the past year, and it gathers a crew of mostly Ivy League and Oxbridge historians to pick 'em.  Their selection usually offers a look at what some credible observers consider to represent some of the world's best historical writing at this moment.  When they get down to the winner, well, we may or may not be interested in its particular topic.  But there's gotta be something in the longlist that sparks some interest.

This year's eight books, introduced by previous winner Ada Ferrer:  

Ada Ferrer, Chair of the Jury, said: “The eight books on our list are all quite different from one another, but all share some essential characteristics: analytical sharpness, engaging writing, and a firm belief that what the past reveals must be urgently understood. The committee is so proud to present this slate of eight books to the world.”

• Emily Callaci (Allen Lane) Wages for Housework: The Story of a Movement, an Idea, a Promise
• Kornel Chang (The Belknap Press of Harvard University) A Fractured Liberation: Korea Under US Occupation
• Marlene L. Daut (Knopf) The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe
• Greg Grandin (Penguin Press) America, América: A New History of the New World
• Benjamin Nathans (Princeton University Press) To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement
• Lyndal Roper (John Murray Press) Summer of Fire and Blood: The German Peasants’ War
• Sophia Rosenfeld (Princeton University Press) The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life
• Martha A. Sandweiss (Princeton University Press) The Girl in the Middle: A Recovered History of the American West

The only one I have heard any review comment about is Roper on the German Peasants' War.  Winner: October 30.

Prize Watch: Cundill Prize (no, I'm not on this list)

The Cundill Prize, the megabucks international history prize administered by McGill University, seems to be finding its feet.  Covering all the histories written in the world (well, in English anyway) must be near-impossible, but this year's look like an impressive list.  This year includes a couple of books of some Canadian interest -- The Civil War of 1812 by Alan Taylor and Liberty's Exiles by Maya Jasanoff -- plus Timothy Snyder's holocaust studies tour de force Bloodlands, and lesser known but still intriguing titles on Italian sainthood, Haitian slavery, and Renaissance identities.  History is a big room.  Full list here.

I actually read last year's Cundill winner, Diamaid MacCulloch's Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, and it was a worthy winner. If you feel the need to engage with a terrific historian really on top of a big subject, you could do worse.

Prize Watch: The GG Nonfiction Nominees UPDATED; and the Cundill History Prize shortlist

The Cundill finalists for 2024

The Canada Council has announced the shortlists for its Governor-General's Literary Awards. The nonfiction list is... mixed.  Heavy on memoir and strong in indigenous context, it has a couple of issue- oriented books, though nothing that would count as history (again).

[Update, October 10:  A friend of the blog writes:

I caught your blog post and laughed out loud at this line: “…it has a couple of issue- oriented books, though nothing that would count as history (again).”

It’s sooo discouraging.

It’s a bit different on the French side, and I’m not sure why. Different juries, I guess.]

Strangely, the GGbooks website presents cover photos of the nominated titles, but no description or jury statements about why they were nominated, nothing about the authors at all, no links. Three PenguinRandom titles, two from indie Canadian presses. On a quick glance, Winipek and The Age of Insecurity (the 2023 Massey Lectures) look substantial, but it's a literary prize: here's hoping the jurors have been assessing on that basis.

Two of the books use that lazy trope "the age of ....[fill in the blank]" but that might be on the publishers.  Congratulations to all the nominees,

• Danny Ramadan, Crooked Teeth: A Gay Syrian Refugee Memoir
• Helen Knott, Becoming a Matriarch
• Petra Molnar, The Walls Have Eyes: Surviving Migration in the Age of Surveillance
• Astra Taylor, The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as Things Fall Apart
• Nigaan Sinclair, Winipek: Visions of Canada from an Indigenous Centre

Over to the Cundill History Prize which announced its three finalists recently.  Looks like a list of big serious straight-up history books this year -- a good thing for that neglected category! Three American nominees for a global prize, however.

Judgement at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia by Gary J. Bass – A landmark history of the post-World War II trials of Japan’s leaders as war criminals, which has shaped relationships throughout modern Asia.

Native Nations: A Millennium in North America by Kathleen DuVal – A sweeping 1000-year history of the power of Indigenous North America, from ancient cities to fights for sovereignty that continue today.

Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights by Dylan C. Penningroth – Stretching from the last decades of slavery to the 1970s, Before the Movement is an account of Black legal lives that looks beyond the Constitution and the criminal justice system, to recover a rich, broader vision of Black life.