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.
Well, it has been a busy week, but I still have one more day of posts to give you, and this one has been in draft most of the week but it was bumped for the surprise World Fantasy Award nomination and the NYT Thrillers list.
It's the Cundill History Prize. From the announcement:
The world’s leading prize for a work of history written or translated into English, the Cundill History Prize, has announced its longlist of fifteen books for 2026, chosen from almost 400 submissions from across the world.
Following in the footsteps of recent Cundill History Prize winners, Lyndal Roper (2025) who was announced as 2026 Holberg Prize Laureate earlier this year, Pulitzer Prize winner Kathleen DuVal (2024) and Guardian journalist Tania Branigan (2023), 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 introduce us to topics from across the globe, spanning continents and generations, from the history of the five partitions that shaped modern South Asia to the legacy of the Magdalene laundries in Ireland, from post-Second World War colonial Africa to the hidden story of Indigenous slavery in US history.
Chair of the Jury Emily Greenwood, James F. Rothenberg Professor of Classics at Harvard University, said: “We are always in history but not always conscious of it. The best analytical and interpretative historical works reveal the past to us in staggering, new ways. Not only do the fifteen works on this year’s longlist recover history through fresh archival research, but they also offer new lines of sight on matters that continue to weigh heavily on us in the present.
“Ranging from the late fourth century CE to the present day, these books address topics including the theft of Indigenous land and people, the geopolitical upheaval of partitions, Jewish history and the shifting nature of anti-Judaism and antisemitism, the history of racial laws and immigration in America, autocracy and leadership cults, the party machinery of communism, the delicate dynamics of international diplomacy, passive collusion on the part of entire societies, the amendment of constitutions, colonial looting and post-colonial restitution, and the complex agency of plants—in this case vanilla—in the modern history of human consumption. Some of these works revise seemingly settled histories: the Africanness of St. Augustine; how to tell the history of Mexico; and new understandings of past dreams of liberation, from lost artworks of the American revolution to visions of Pan-Africanism.”
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 a lot of leisure reading circulation. It might 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 and use prize lists to build out our collections and remind readers of these great books.
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.
Because this a a history prize and the jurors are all academics, they also have a great page explaining exactly how they pick their winners. I appreciate the transparency of this page.
Finally, and regular readers know exactly what is coming next, you can make this display interactive but using it as a conversation starter, but asking-- What is your favorite popular history book? This is an excellent way to engage your nonfiction readers in your RA efforts.
Remember, you can click here for the post where I explain how to ask these conversation starter questions in the library and online to capture your patron's answers and make displays that include them in the RA Conversation.
Back Monday with 5 reviews by me from the August 2026 issue of Booklist.
