Books by History Faculty members shortlisted for the Cundhill and PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize

Three members of the Faculty have been shortlisted for major history prizes.

Professor Tim Harper’s Underground Asia: Global Revolutionaries and the Assault on Empire (Penguin, 2020) was shortlisted for the Cundhill History Prize. Underground Asia examines how clandestine networks undermined twentieth-century empire across Asia. You can read more about it and the other shortlisted works here. The Cundhill History Prize is an award of US$75,000 given annually to the book that embodies historical scholarship, originality, literary quality and broad appeal.

More recently, books by Professor Helen McCarthy and Professor Sujit Sivasundaram were shortlisted for the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize for History 2021, an award celebrating the best non-fiction on any historical subject. McCarthy’s Double Lives: A History of Working Motherhood (Bloomsbury, 2020) studies the working lives of mothers over the last 180 years. Sivasundaram’s Waves Across the South: A New History of Revolution and Empire (William Collins, 2020) tells the story of seafaring trade and commerce and the colonial violence it wrought on southern shores. The full shortlist for the prize is here.

Professor Sivasundaram's book has also been shortlisted for the British Academy Prize for Global Cultural Understanding 2021. More information here.