This is part of my ongoing series on using Awards Lists as a RA tool. Click here for all posts in the series in reverse chronological order. Click here for the first post which outlines the details how to use awards lists as a RA tool.
Two important longlists for our RA purposes were announced in the last few days.
First up The Cundill History Prize. From the announcement:
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.
You can see the full longlist of titles here
As you can see above, this is a history prize that values, "craft, communication, and consequence." This focus on those three pillars, especially the "communication" piece means that these 15 titles are excellent history reads for a library patron audience. History is one of the nonfiction area where we see
not in the same high numbers as things like true crime, cookbooks, or biography and memoir, but it is popular enough that we can make displays, use prize lists to build out our collections
And because these are just "History" and not a specific branch or type of history, the titles themselves represent a broad swath of excellent, vetted history writing. You can coincidently add these titles across your dewey areas and suggest them with confidence.
The Cundill Prize also has easy backlist access going back to 2008 here. Since we are talking about history books, backlist titles are less time sensitive. Dig deep into the backlist for this one because history never gets old. (pun intended)
And that backlist will help you make a display of history books. You can even use the prize's mantra as your catchy sign/title-- "History books of craft, communication, and consequence"-- that will draw readers in to see what that means. You can even put the logo for the prize on the sign. And for the online version of your display, add a link to the prize itself.
And second of the two, a prize for debuts. The Center for Fiction recently announced their longlist for the First Novel Prize. From that announcement:
We are pleased to announce the longlist for The Center for Fiction 2025 First Novel Prize. This year, we received 185 submitted titles with U.S. publication dates between January 1 and December 31, 2025. Over 300 readers, writers, booksellers, librarians, and other members of The Center’s diverse community reviewed the submissions and selected the 29 debut novels on the 2025 First Novel Prize Longlist below.
Inaugurated in 2006, the First Novel Prize honors the best debut novel of the year and supports emerging voices in fiction. Each year, the winning author receives a $15,000 prize in recognition of their contribution to contemporary literature and in support of their ongoing creative career. Past winners of the Prize include Marisha Pessl, Junot Díaz, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Tommy Orange, Raven Leilani, and De’Shawn Charles Winslow. In the fall, our judging panel of four distinguished authors will determine the 2025 First Novel Prize Shortlist. Each shortlisted author will receive a $1,000 award.
We are proud to share these extraordinary books with you. Please join us in congratulating The Center for Fiction 2025 First Novel Prize longlisted authors.
The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize is supported in part by Hawthornden Foundation. For support opportunities, please reach out to Melissa Wyse and Anne Townsend at development@centerforfiction.org.
This one speaks for itself. You need to go check if you own all 29 of these novels. You probably have a lot of these, but make sure. I love how long this long list truly is. They are identifying a huge list of excellent debut novels to make sure all who deserve to be noticed in the crowded publishing landscape get their moment to shine.
In the Fall there will be a short list narrowed down by a panel of judges, and each of those authors will get $1,000, which is important to note. Only 1 person can win the $15,000 prize, but that $1,000 for the short list authors will go a long way toward keeping them on th path to write a second book.
Also, don't forget, the easily accessed archive of every longlist and winner for the First Novel Prize is also a treasure trove of information. Obviously, you can find authors who are now bestsellers in that backlist, yes. But what about those authors whose first novel got a ton of critical acclaim but then did not make that jump to being more well known? Not making that jump does not make them less worthy of being read; in fact, that debut novel may be the hidden gem titles your patrons will love.
Great debut novels are something many readers search for, but remember, they don't have to be the debuts of right now. You can find excellent debut novels, many of which your patrons would never find without your help pointing them out through a suggestion, list, or displays.
Please use the links in the header of this post to learn more about how Awards Lists can be your best RA Tool.
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