The longlist for the 2026 Cundill History Prize has been revealed, with 15 books in contention for the award given annually to a “book that embodies historical scholarship, originality, literary quality and broad appeal.”
Jill Lepore made the longlist for We The People: A History of the U.S. Constitution, which won the Pulitzer Prize for history in May. Howard W. French was nominated for The Second Emancipation: Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism, and Global Blackness at High Tide, which was a finalist for the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and Sam Dalrymple was longlisted for Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia, an Orwell Prize finalist.
Zara Anishanslin was nominated for The Painter’s Fire: A Forgotten History of the Artists Who Championed the American Revolution, alongside Louise Brangan for The Fallen: The Lost Girls of Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries and a Legacy of Silence, Jonathan Cheng for Korean Messiah: Kim Il Sung and the Christian Roots of North Korea’s Personality Cult, Carol Chillington Rutter for Lying Abroad: Henry Wotton and the Invention of Diplomacy, Catherine Conybeare for Augustine the African, and Linford D. Fisher for Stealing America: The Hidden Story of Indigenous Slavery in U.S. History.
Also making the longlist were Paul Gillingham for Mexico: A 500-Year History; Eric T. Jennings for Vanilla: The History of an Extraordinary Bean; Alexander Lee for The First Ghetto: Venice and the Origins of Modern Antisemitism; Beth Lew-Williams for John Doe Chinaman: A Forgotten History of Chinese Life Under American Racial Law; Barnaby Phillips for The African Kingdom of Gold: Britain and the Asante Treasure; and Joseph Torigian for The Party’s Interests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping.
The Cundill History Prize, which is administered by McGill University and comes with a cash award of $75,000, was established in 2008. Previous winners include Anne Applebaum for Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944–1956; Daniel Beer for The House of the Dead: Siberian Exile Under the Tsars; and Kathleen DuVal for Native Nations: A Millennium in North America.
The shortlist for this year’s prize will be revealed on Sept. 2, with the winner announced at an event in Montreal on Oct. 23.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
