This is the 254th edition of SHuSH, the official newsletter of The Sutherland House Inc. If you’re new to SHuSH, push the button:
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The Cundill History Prize ought to be one of the best known literary awards in the world.
It was established at McGill University in 2008 by Peter Cundill (1938-2011), a wealthy investment manager and graduate of the school. “I was surprised to learn there were no major prizes in history,” he said on its announcement. “I’m an investment researcher of finance and I think there’s an analogy between the two disciplines—both study the past to understand the present and predict the future.”
I’m not sure he was correct that a knowledge of the past lets you see in the dark, and there were several good history prizes available at the time (still are), but creating the prize was a great thing for Peter Cundill to have done, and a great gift to the disciplines of researched nonfiction and history in particular.
Among the major reasons the prize deserves to be better known is that it has now been around for almost two decades, it is managed well, and it is rich.
Very rich: $75,000 (all US dollars unless otherwise mentioned) to the winner and $10,000 to each of two runner-ups. As far as I can tell, that’s top of the heap for a single book prize in the English nonfiction world.
The big three US nonfiction prizes are the Pulitzer at $15,000, the National Book Award at $10,000, and the National Book Critics Circle Award with no cash award. Other significant American awards are the Bancroft, which celebrates American history and diplomacy ($10,000); the Kirkus Prize for general nonfiction ($50,000); the George Washington Prize for American history ($50,000), the LA Times Book Prizes (no cash); and the Pen/Galbraith Award ($10,000).
The biggest UK prizes for non-fiction books are the Baillie Gifford at £50,000 (approximately $63,000 US), The Wolfson History Prize (same amount), and the Royal Society Science Book Prize at £25,000. The Costa Book Awards had a biography category at £5,000 but tapped out last year. The Orwell Prize for Political Writing is £3,000.
Canada has a number of good nonfiction prizes, starting with the Hilary Weston at $60,000 CAD (about $45,000 US), the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing at $25,000 CAD, the Lionel Gelber Prize for global affairs at $15,000 CAD, and the Governor General’s Award at $25,000 CAD. The Donner Prize and the Balsillie Prize, both for public policy writing, offer $50,000 and $60,000 CAD, respectively. We lost our best Canadian nonfiction prize, the Charles Taylor, in 2020 ($30,000 CAD).
This is not an exhaustive list. There are hundreds of nonfiction book prizes. I’ve never won any of them, although I’m a seasoned loser, specializing in cashless awards—the National Book Critic Circle, LA Times, etc.
The Canadian awards, and a lot of the American nonfiction ones, including the Pulitzer and the National Book Award, are limited to writers with the appropriate passport. The Cundill is open to the whole world, which makes it ultra-competitive and of potentially higher quality.
The Baillie Gifford, too, is open to the world. I always find a lot to read on its long list and look forward every year to its release, which came last week. It was followed a few days later by the Cundill long list. Made me wonder why I never look forward to the Cundill list in the same way. I don’t think I’m alone. (I was a Cundill judge for several years and a member of its advisory committee and I know that its administrators have long been frustrated that it doesn’t have a higher profile.)
Each list got good coverage in the trade press this year. The Baillie Gifford made the major UK papers—The Times, The Guardian, The Telegraph—as well as Associated Press and MSN in the US. The Cundill press release was picked up only by CBC digital.
The prizes have similar mandates. The Cundill seeks to honour books that make history engaging and compelling, encouraging a deeper understanding of history's role in shaping contemporary society. The Baillie Gifford seeks to honour original, thought-provoking, and accessible nonfiction works that contribute to public discourse and intellectual engagement.
That the Cundill is directed at history and the Baillie Gifford at general nonfiction is not as significant a difference as it might seem: seven of the last ten Baillie Gifford winners have been histories.
I looked up the last ten winners of both prizes on Amazon.com, a neutral site given the awards are based in the UK and Canada. Sales numbers aren’t everything, but they are probably the best way to measure if each prize is meeting its stated objective of celebrating engaging and compelling, or accessible and broadly interesting books. Sales are also indicative of the prize’s profile and influence: does winning one bring a book a greater audience? The Booker and the Giller, to mention two well-known fiction prizes, are celebrated for their ability to drive winning titles up bestseller lists. Of course, quality matters, too, but that’s what the juries are for.
These are the last ten Cundill winners:
Gary Bass, The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide
Susan Pedersen, The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire
Thomas Laqueur, The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains
Daniel Beer, The House of the Dead: Siberian Exile Under the Tsars.
Maya Jasanoff, The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World
Julia Lovell, Maoism: A Global History
Camilla Townsend, Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs
Marjoleine Kars, Blood on the River; A Chronicle of Mutiny and Freedom on the Wild Coast
Tiya Miles, All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, A Black Family Keepsake
Tania Branigan, Red Memory: Remembering and Forgetting China’s Cultural Revolution
These are the last ten Baillie Gifford winners:
Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk
Steve Silberman: NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and How to Think Smarter About People Who Think Differently
Philippe Sands, East West Street: On The Origins of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity
David France, How To Survive a Plague: The Inside Story of How Citizens and Science Tamed AIDS
Serhii Plokhy, Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy
Hallie Rubenhold, The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper
Craig Brown, One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time
Patrick Radden Keefe, Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty
Katherine Rundell, Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne
John Valliant, Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World
As of last night, the average sales ranking of the last ten Cundill winners on Amazon.com was 395,867, which is rather dismal. Only two of its winners were in the top 100,000, and its highest ranked book, Tiya Miles’ All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake, was at 15,255.
As of last night, the average ranking of the last ten Baillie Gifford winners on Amazon.com was 62,715. All but one of its winners were in the top 100,000, and the best of the bunch, NeuroTribes, published in 2016, was at 2,226.
Is the Baillie Gifford simply selecting more broadly appealing titles, or is it making them popular? Hard to say, but it seems to be doing a far better job of promoting history to a general audience (it also seems relatively less invested in tomes on death, war, genocide and Mao). The Cundill authors are getting big cheques, but their books are disappearing.
The difference, to my mind, is that the Cundill is heavily influenced by academic historians and the Baillie Gifford is not. The Cundill includes “historical scholarship” as a criteria in its selection process, and it tends to have a strong presence of academic historians on its jury.
This is the Cundill jury in 2024.
Rana Mitter, professor of US-Asia relations, Harvard Kennedy School
Nicole Eustace, professor of history, New York University
Moses Ochonu, professor of African history, Vanderbilt
Rebecca L. Spang, professor of history, Indiana University Bloomington
Stephanie Nolen, New York Times.
This is the Baillie Gifford jury.
Isabel Hilton, broadcaster and founder of China Dialogue
Heather Brooke, author and investigative journalist
Alison Flood, culture editor, New Scientist
Peter Hoskin, culture editor, Prospect
Tomiwa Owolade, writer and critic
Chitra Ramaswamy, author and TV critic
I don’t know any of the current members of the Cundill jury and I haven’t been in touch with the prize for a while, so this isn’t a comment on them in particular, but the Cundill juries have tended to have a critical mass of academics who seem either unwilling or unable to identify and favour works of broad appeal. Jury work is as much about reaching consensus as it is about identifying excellence. In my experience with the prize, the need to satisfy the academics and their interpretation of the prize’s “historical scholarship” criteria favours works by academic historians. It’s no accident that nine of the Cundill’s last ten winners were written by academics.
It goes without saying that some academics write well for general audiences. But, by and large, and for many decades now, members of the academic historical profession have been far more interested in writing for each other than for the reading public. So it’s also no accident that the Cundill has struggled to engage the public and that its winners tend to reach limited audiences.
It was never clear to me that Peter Cundill wanted his to be a prize for academic history. He seems to have wanted to promote history for the general reader, regardless of the credentials of the author, more in line with what Baillie Gifford is doing (four of its last ten winners are academics). The administrators of the prize at McGill seem to have steered it in its current direction, perhaps having no choice given that they work at an academic institution.
I’m a supporter of the Cundill. Here is the latest long list (all but one written by a PhD). I’m delighted that the prize exists and I wish it well, but I fear it will continue to be the richest prize no one has heard of, and fail to deliver on its most important objective of promoting the reading of history, unless it can do something about the narrow range of books it is celebrating.
Lots to celebrate here
It was a big week at Sutherland House. Anne Allan’s Dancing With Diana, a memoir of her nine years secretly teaching dance to the late Princess of Wales, made People magazine.
We’ve had a lot of great US publicity in our short existence—the New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Rolling Stone, the Los Angeles Times, NPR—but we’ve never before made People, which these days is by far the best-read magazine in America (audited weekly readership 94 million, advertising rates a staggering $385,000 per page—how does any analog publication get six-figures a page in the digital era?).
Anne’s book got four pages of coverage and a mention on the cover. She’s also in Vanity Fair, three editions of HELLO!, Le Figaro, US Magazine, among many, many other outlets.
More about the book:
“Dancing makes you feel heaps better” – Diana
In 1981, after the wedding of the century, Anne Allan, a dancer, and ballet mistress with the London City Ballet, was offered an unusual assignment. Her Royal Highness Diana, the Princess of Wales, wanted dance lessons. Would Anne be her teacher?
Anne and her royal pupil were soon meeting at a private studio for the first of hundreds of secret weekly one-hour lessons that were never on the princess’s official schedule and never be discovered by the ever-lurking press. Under Anne’s direction, Diana mounted her spectacular debut on the stage of Covent Garden, videotaped a solo performance at Her Majesty’s Theatre, and made clandestine backstage visits to ballets and West End shows for the Princess to get as close as she could to the lives and work of real dancers.
Over the course of nine years, teacher and pupil became close friends. Diana appreciated having an outsider to whom she could speak candidly about her personal challenges and her place in the royal world. They would talk, laugh, cry, and—always—dance.
Most importantly, Diana learned to express her true self in physical movement. By her last class, the Princess had learned to carry herself with confidence, poise, and grace, both inside and outside the studio. Dance, says Anne, had “nourished and renewed her soul.”
Ted Barris’s Battle of Britain: Canadian Airmen in their Finest Hour, debuted yesterday at #5 on the Toronto Star bestseller list. It’s our third bestseller of the year.
Ted has to be the hardest working author in Canadian nonfiction. He has about fifty events lined up between now and Christmas. He’s a great storyteller and he puts a lot of work into his presentations. Chances are he’ll be performing somewhere near you in the coming months. Check out his calendar here.
Here’s more about the book:
For 113 terrifying days in 1940, Nazi Germany’s air force, the Luftwaffe, threw everything it had at Great Britain in hopes of early victory in World War II. The task of defending southern England from airborne attack fell to pilots in the Royal Air Force, supplemented in their darkest hour by more than 100 flyers from Canada. These Canadians, some from famous families, some straight off the farm, served in forty-seven different Battle of Britain squadrons.
Now, for the first time, bestselling military historian Ted Barris’s tells the riveting story of their crucial role in this do-or-die-battle: how they accounted for 130 German aircraft destroyed, another thirty probably destroyed and more than seventy damaged, with twenty pilots dying in action and twelve awarded Distinguished Flying Crosses. Battle of Britain: Canadian Airmen in their Finest Hour is a must for enthusiasts of military and aviation history.
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I think for any prize, the marketing/PR team is key for the follow-through and the reputation of the prize to the wider public, something that takes time but builds up. The books, eventually, live and die on their own, but the Cundill's long-tail is non existent and so offers nothing to the winning titles beyond the initial announcement. You can call something "prize-winning" but if that prize is unknown it has no power.
I appreciated the detail in this post so much. The Cundill...I had no idea. In addition the book prize amounts and the list of the Baillie Gifford winners, felt like I'd listened to hours of podcasts. Thank you, love your Substack.