The prize, funded from former PEN member Marjorie Hessell-Tiltman’s bequest to English PEN, celebrates the best non-fiction on a historical subject in any period up to the Second World War.

The 2015 shortlist

• The Fateful Year by Mark Bostridge (Penguin – Viking)
• God’s Traitors by Jessie Childs (Bodley Head)
• Pagan Britain by Ronald Hutton (Yale)
• The English and Their History by Robert Tombs (Allen Lane)
• In These Times by Jenny Uglow (Faber)

The Hessell-Tiltman Prize is judged this year by Tom Holland, David Horspool and Ruth Scurr. Chair of judges Tom Holland, who won the prize in 2004 for Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic, said:

The shortlist we have chosen for this year’s prize bears witness to the remarkable strength and variety of historical writing in Britain at the moment. It ranges in time from the first settlement of human beings in this country to the outbreak of the First World War, and embraces issues as various as the nature of England, the domestic front during the Napoleonic wars, and recusancy under Elizabeth I. Stimulating, sometimes topical and always compulsively readable, there is something here for everyone.

The winning book will be announced at 4:30pm on Wednesday 15 April 2015 at the PEN Literary Salon at the London Book Fair.