September 30th 2026 in News

The 2026 Cundill History Prize Finalists

The Cundill History Prize, one of the world’s leading prizes for a work of history written in, or translated into, English, has today announced the three finalists for 2026.

Jonathan Cheng, Alexander Lee and Beth Lew-Williams have been selected as the finalists for the Cundill History Prize by an international jury of leading historians and writers, chaired by Emily Greenwood (Harvard University). The three finalists are in contention for the grand prize of US$75,000, one of the largest sums awarded to a single author for any prize in the world. The other two finalists will each receive an award of US$10,000. The prize is administered by McGill University, and the winner will be announced at the Cundill Festival in Montreal on October 23.

From the world’s first Jewish Ghetto in sixteenth century Venice, to the hidden influence of American Christianity on the Kim Dynasty, to anti-Chinese discrimination in the early American West, these three books illuminate the violence of segregation and the struggles of those who resisted, and cast new light on a secretive regime. 

2026 Chair of the Jury, Emily Greenwood, said: “This year’s three finalists have written vivid historical accounts of complex subjects, and all three books have strong resonance and staying power. Jonathan Cheng’s Korean Messiah brings together strands of North Korea’s history that are typically kept separate, showing how Kim Il Sung’s idiosyncratic borrowings from the evangelical Christianity of his youth have been a crucial element of the mythmaking of the three-generation political Kim dynasty. John Doe Chinaman and The First Ghetto analyse conditional inclusion as a form of social control—of the Chinese in the American West and the Jews in Venice—in all its cruel unpredictability. Alexander Lee’s The First Ghetto foregrounds the stories of the Ghetto’s Jewish inhabitants, enabling readers to understand the significance of the Venice Ghetto as both a flourishing Jewish stronghold and a vulnerable enclosure over a five-hundred-year history. In John Doe Chinaman Beth Lew-Williams analyses the panoply of Anti-Chinese laws that states and municipalities used to control and intimidate Chinese migrants in the American West and reconstructs the lives that the Chinese lived under and despite these laws.”

In a very competitive field, Cheng, Lee and Lew-Williams’ books were selected from a shortlist of eight distinguished titles, including Jill Lepore’s We the People, winner of the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for History, and Sam Dalrymple’s Shattered Lands, a finalist for the 2026 Orwell Prize for Political Writing.

The 2026 Finalists

• Jonathan Cheng
(Knopf)
Korean Messiah: Kim Il Sung and the Christian Roots of North Korea’s Personality Cult

• Alexander Lee
(Picador)
The First Ghetto: Venice and the Jews

• Beth Lew-Williams
(The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press)
John Doe Chinaman: A Forgotten History of Chinese Life Under American Racial Law