Join us and winners of the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize from the past 25 years – including David Olusoga, Kojo Koram, Anita Anand, Avi Shlaim, and Margaret MacMillan – as they consider the past, present and future of historical non-fiction. What is its role in an era of instability and disinformation? Through which lenses and voices should we analyse global events? And what can books do when history seems to be repeating itself?
At the end of the event, the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize “winner of winners” will be announced – the previous PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize-winning book considered by returning judges to have made the most significant contribution to historical non-fiction since the millennium.
This special edition, which marks the end of the Prize, has been judged by critic and broadcaster Shahidha Bari; historian, academic and critic Kathryn Hughes; and the Migration Museum’s artistic director Aditi Anand. They will appear in conversation with the previous winners before announcing the “winner of winners”. Copies of previous winning titles will be available to buy, signed by the attending authors.
The PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize of £2,000 has been awarded annually since 2002 for a non-fiction book of specifically historical content. Entrants are books of high literary merit – that is, not primarily written for the academic market – and can cover all historical periods. Marjorie Hessell-Tiltman was a member of PEN during the 1960s and 1970s. On her death in 1999 she bequeathed £100,000 to the PEN Literary Foundation to found a prize in her name.
The full list of titles being considered for the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize “Winner of Winners” is:
- Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew by Avi Shlaim (Oneworld)
- Uncommon Wealth: Britain and the Aftermath of Empire by Kojo Koram (John Murray)
- God: An Anatomy by Francesca Stavrakopoulou (Picador)
- Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art by Rebecca Wragg Sykes (Bloomsbury)
- The Patient Assassin: A True Tale of Massacre, Revenge and the Raj by Anita Anand (Simon & Schuster)
- The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books: Young Columbus and the Quest for a Universal Library by Edward Wilson-Lee (William Collins)
- Russia in Revolution: An Empire in Crisis, 1890 to 1928 by S. A. Smith (Oxford University Press)
- Black and British: A Forgotten History by David Olusoga (Picador)
- The German War: A Nation Under Arms, 1939–45 by Nicholas Stargardt (Vintage)
- God’s Traitors: Terror and Faith in Elizabethan England by Jessie Childs (Vintage)
- The Long Shadow: The Great War and the Twentieth Century by David Reynolds (Simon & Schuster)
- Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II by Keith Lowe (Penguin)
- The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood by James Gleick (4th Estate)
- The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt: The History of a Civilisation from 3000BC to Cleopatra by Toby Wilkinson (Bloomsbury)
- A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years by Diarmaid MacCulloch (Penguin)
- The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front, 1915–1919 by Mark Thompson (Faber)
- That Neutral Island: A Cultural History of Ireland during World War II by Clair Wills (Faber)
- The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization by Bryan Ward-Perkins (Oxford University Press)
- The Dictators: Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia by Richard Overy (Penguin)
- Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic by Tom Holland (Abacus)
- The Lunar Men: The Inventors of the Modern World 1730–1810 by Jenny Uglow (Faber)
- Peacemakers by Margaret MacMillan (John Murray)