Fifteen history books have been longlisted for the 2026 Cundill History Prize, selected from almost 400 submissions from across the world. The prize, administered by McGill University in Montreal and awarded annually to a book that demonstrates excellence in history writing in English, carries one of the largest purses in literary non-fiction: US$75,000 for the winner and US$10,000 for each of three runners-up. (Publishing Perspectives)

The longlist ranges across centuries and continents. Catherine Conybeare's Augustine the African (Liveright/Profile Books) reaches into late antiquity, while Paul Gillingham's Mexico: A 500-year History (Grove Atlantic) sweeps across half a millennium of a single nation. Jill Lepore's We The People: A History of the US Constitution (Liveright/John Murray Press) and Zara Anishanslin's The Painter's Fire: A Forgotten History of the Artists Who Championed the American Revolution (Harvard University Press) both take American foundations as their subject. Eric T. Jennings's Vanilla: The History of an Extraordinary Bean (Yale University Press) traces a single commodity through the global trade that grew around it.

Several titles revisit violent chapters of colonial and racial history. Linford D. Fisher's Stealing America: The Hidden Story of Indigenous Slavery in US History (Liveright/WW Norton) and Beth Lew-Williams's John Doe Chinaman: A Forgotten History of Chinese Life Under American Racial Law (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press) each recover suppressed narratives of law and exploitation in the United States. Louise Brangan's The Fallen: The Magdalene Laundries and Ireland's Legacy of Silence (Bodley Head) examines institutional abuse in Ireland. Barnaby Phillips's The African Kingdom of Gold: Britain and the Asante Treasure (Oneworld) takes up the British Empire's looting of Asante royal regalia.

The list also reaches into the inner machinery of authoritarian power. Joseph Torigian's The Party's Interests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping (Stanford University Press) is a biography of the Chinese president's father. Jonathan Cheng's Korean Messiah: Kim Il Sung and the Christian Roots of North Korea's Personality Cult (Knopf) traces religious influence on the founding mythology of North Korea. Howard W. French's Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism, and Global Blackness at High Tide (Liveright/WW Norton) and Sam Dalrymple's Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia (William Collins) both take on large-scale political movements that reshaped their regions.

Rounding out the fifteen are Alexander Lee's The First Ghetto: Venice and the Jews (Picador), Carol Chillington Rutter's Lying Abroad: Henry Wotton and the Invention of Diplomacy (Manchester University Press), and the two remaining titles noted above.

Emily Greenwood, the James F. Rothenberg Professor of Classics at Harvard University, chaired the jury. She stepped into the role after Timothy Brook — a Canadian historian of China and the Ming dynasty — stepped down due to what Publishing Perspectives described as "unforeseen circumstances." The panel also included Ned Blackhawk, Barbara Weinstein, and Fergal Keane. The report on the longlist was filed by Andrew Richard Albanese, Editor-in-Chief of Publishing Perspectives.

The shortlist of finalists will be announced on Wednesday, 2 September 2026. The winner will be named at an event in Montreal on 23 October 2026. The prize acknowledges receipt of all submissions but contacts only those authors whose books make the longlist, according to the Cundill Prize's own submission guidance (Cundill Prize).

For the authors, publishers, and agents involved, the longlist is a signal: these fifteen titles now move into the final stages of a jury process that will, by late October, hand one historian a cheque and a great deal more visibility for their book.