July 28th 2025 in News

The 2025 Cundill History Prize Longlist

The jurors have chosen 15 exceptional titles to be longlisted for the 2025 Cundill History Prize.

Following in the footsteps of recent Cundill History Prize winners, Kathleen DuVal (2024) who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2025, Guardian journalist Tania Branigan (2023) and National Book Award winner Tiya Miles (2022), the fifteen longlisted authors will now be in the running for the US$75,000 prize. The Cundill History Prize is awarded annually to a book that demonstrates excellence across the prize’s guiding criteria: craft, communication, and consequence.

The books on this year’s longlist shed light on compelling stories that span continents and generations, taking us from the Haitian Revolution of the 1790s to the German Peasants’ War of 1524; from Soviet dissidents in the 1960s to American and Australian abolitionists of the 1800s.

The shortlist will be announced in early September, 2025.

Chair of the Jury Ada Ferrer, Dayton-Stockton Professor of History at Princeton University and a Cundill History Prize finalist in 2022, said: “As is to be expected from a Cundill History Prize book, the fifteen titles on this year’s longlist combine superb writing with rigorous and imaginative craft to tackle topics and questions of lasting, sometimes urgent significance. They range widely not only in geographic and temporal scope, but also in method: from sweeping narrative history and biography, to close reading of legal texts, photographs, and dance cards, even to a fascinating walk in a postcolonial city as means to understand an unwritten history, centuries old. The result is a list of fifteen singular books that represent the calibre and diversity of history writing today. Huge congratulations to all the historians and authors on our list.”

Ada Ferrer has been joined by leading international historians and writers Sunil Amrith, François Furstenberg, Afua Hirsch and Francesca Trivellato to complete the jury this year.

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The 2025 Cundill History Prize Longlist

• Manan Ahmed Asif
  (The New Press)
  Disrupted City: Walking the Pathways of Memory and History in Lahore

• 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

• Santilla Chingaipe
  (Scribner Australia, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Australia)
  Black Convicts: How Slavery Shaped Australia

• Marlene L. Daut
  (Knopf)
  The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe

• Jonathan Gienapp
  (Yale University Press)
  Against Constitutional Originalism: A Historical Critique

• Greg Grandin
  (Penguin Press)
  America, América: A New History of the New World

• Tiya Miles
  (Penguin Press)
  Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People

• Benjamin Nathans
  (Princeton University Press)
  To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement

• Josephine Quinn
  (Random House)
  How the World Made the West: A 4,000 Year History

• Seth Rockman
  (University of Chicago Press)
  Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery

• 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

• Sanjay Subrahmanyam (Saqi Books)
  Across the Green Sea: Histories from the Western Indian Ocean, 1440–1640