DuVal wins 2024 Cundill History Prize
Kathleen DuVal has been announced as the 2024 winner of the US$75,000 (A$114,122) Cundill History Prize for Native Nations: A Millennium in North America (Random House US).
Jury chair Rana Mitter said: ‘One of the most wonderful things about Native Nations … is that it brings unexpected and, to many readers, unknown aspects of that story, to prominence. [DuVal] does this by bringing in historians and analysts of the Indigenous American experience from within their own scholarship, bringing the story to the forefront of our wider understanding in this huge sweeping history that starts more than 1000 years ago and brings us up to the present day.’
In a statement, the prize organisers said DuVal’s book showed how, long before colonisation, Indigenous peoples adapted to climate change and instability with innovation, forming smaller communities and egalitarian government structures with complex economies that spread across North America. ‘Challenging dominant narratives, DuVal refutes that the arrival of Europeans led to the end of Indigenous civilisations in North America; instead she vividly reveals the interactions and complex relationships that developed between nations,’ the statement continued.
Selected from the shortlist were two runners-up, each receiving US$10,000 (A$14,988): Gary J Bass for Judgement at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia (Picador) and Dylan C Penningroth for Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights (Liveright).
Administered by McGill University in Montreal, Canada, the Cundill History Prize is awarded annually to an individual from any country for a book that has had, or is likely to have, ‘a profound literary, social and academic impact in the area of history’.
Last year’s winner of the award was Tania Branigan for Red Memory: Living, Remembering and Forgetting China’s Cultural Revolution (Faber).
More information about the Cundill History Prize is available on the prize website.
Category: International awards International news
