PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize

Kojo Koram

2023 winner

Dr Kojo Koram is a lecturer at the School of Law at Birkbeck College, Uneiversity of London. He is the editor of The War on Drugs and the Global Colour Line. Prior to academia, Kojo worked in social welfare law, youth work and teaching. Kojo has written for The Guardian, Washington Post, Nation, Dissent, New Statesman and Critical Legal Thinking.

Francesca Stavrakopoulou

2022 winner

Professor Francesca Stavrakopoulou studied theology at Oxford and is currently Professor of Hebrew Bible and Ancient Religion at the University of Exeter. The author of a number of academic works, she also presented the BBC2 documentary series The Bible’s Buried Secrets. She regularly appears on BBC1’s The Big Questions and Sunday Morning Live, and has appeared on several BBC Radio 4 shows, including Woman’s Hour, The Infinite Monkey Cage and The Museum of Curiosity. She writes for the Guardian, the Mail on Sunday, and the Times Literary Supplement, and has spoken about the Bible, religion, and atheism at numerous public events, including the Cheltenham Science Festival, the World Humanist Congress, and Conway Hall’s annual London Thinks festival. Her contribution (on the same subject as the book) to Dan Snow’s History Hits podcast is currently its most popular ever episode.

Rebecca Wragg Sykes

2021 winner

Rebecca Wragg Sykes has been fascinated by the vanished worlds of the Pleistocene ice ages since childhood and followed this interest through a scientific career researching the most enigmatic characters of all, the Neanderthals. Alongside her academic expertise, Rebecca has earned a reputation for exceptional public communication in print, broadcast and as a speaker. Her writing has featured in The Guardian, Aeon, and Scientific American, and she has appeared on history and science programmes for BBC Radio 4. She works as an archaeological and creative consultant, and co-founded the influential TrowelBlazers project, highlighting women in archaeology and the earth sciences.

Anita Anand

2020 winner

The Patient Assassin recounts the story of one Indian’s twenty-year quest for revenge, taking him around the world in search of those he held responsible for the Amritsar massacre of 1919, which cost the lives of hundreds. 

Rana Mitter, chair of judges said:

‘When seeking a winner, the judges hoped that the book we chose would have historical rigour, a rich base of research, and an ability to speak to wider historical questions beyond its immediate subject.  We also hoped that it would be the kind of read we couldn’t put down.  Getting all of that in one book might have been too much to ask – but as it turned out, our 2020 winner has displayed all those qualities and more.  Anita Anand’s The Patient Assassin is the story of a murderer and his victim – a British colonial official assassinated by an Indian avenger more than two decades after the horrific Amritsar massacre of 1919, for which that official was partly responsible.  Yet it is much more than the story of two men.  It is an account of how global the spirit of anti-imperialist revolution was in the early twentieth century.  It is also an empathetic account of how categories of good and evil in the context of empire have to be understood in more nuanced and complex ways.  For those looking to question empire in the present day, it is a book that provides many answers. But we are also confident that The Patient Assassin is something more – a genuine historical classic that will be read for decades to come.’ 

Anita Anand said:

‘I am truly honoured by the judge’s decision. In a field of exceptional books by such esteemed historians, I felt lucky just to be shortlisted. To be chosen as the winner is overwhelming, and I will be pinching myself for some time to come. The Patient Assassin is very close to my heart.  Having been weaned on the story of Jallianwala Bagh, thanks to our family connection, I wanted to write the history of the massacre and Udham Singh’s revenge as an antidote to the rose-tinted portrayals of the Raj – so popular in film and television. I also needed to understand how such unspeakable things could be allowed to happen. Faced by complicated characters, contrary accounts, obscure sources, the weight of folklore and deliberate attempts to hide truth, I sometimes doubted that I could do justice to this dark episode. I’m so glad I persevered. Thank you for this award. It means so much to me and would have meant so much to my father and grandfather.’ 

Edward Wilson-Lee

2019 winner

Edward Wilson-Lee won the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize 2019 for The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books: Young Columbus and the Quest for a Universal Library (William Collins). The book is the story of Christopher Columbus’ illegitimate son Hernando, who sought to equal and surpass his father’s achievements by creating a universal library to harness the vast powers of the new printing presses to assemble the world’s knowledge in one place.

‘I feel deeply honoured to have been awarded the Hessell-Tiltman Prize, especially in such a golden age for history writing. Many have taken up the task, urgent in this era of false and lazy narratives, of winning back readers with histories that are both exhilarating and accountable to their sources, and I am proud to be counted among them. Hernando’s story shows that when we get past historical clichés, we discover a world that is far richer, stranger and more thought-provoking, and all the more wondrous for it.’
Edward Wilson-Lee

S.A. Smith

2018 winner

S.A. Smith won the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize 2018 for his ‘mesmerising’ Russia in Revolution: An Empire in Crisis, 1890 – 1928 (OUP).

The book is a panoramic account of the Russian Revolution and how it transformed the face of the Russian empire, politically, economically, socially, and culturally, and also profoundly affected the course of world history for the rest of the twentieth century.

David Olusoga

2017 winner

David Olusoga won the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize 2017 for Black and British: A Forgotten History (Macmillan).

The book is a re-examination of the long relationship between the British Isles and the people of Africa and the Caribbean, and was accompanied by a four-part television series, broadcast on BBC Two in November 2016.

“It has been a bizarre and wonderful experience, to get all these other people’s histories and experiences, and weave them together – with my own very personal stories, but also with a bigger story of this country … No group – no ethnic group, no political group – owns any part of history. Its all of ours, and ours to conquer, and subdue, to make us go crazy.”
David Olusoga

Nicholas Stargardt

2016 winner

Nicholas Stargardt won the PEN Hessell Tiltman Prize for History 2016 for his book ‘The German War: A Nation Under Arms, 1939-45’, published by Bodley Head.

“This is a book which forced itself onto me as I realised that historians had written about everything except how ordinary Germans experienced the Second World War. And it started from the grimmest point: how people began to talk in public about the Holocaust in the wake of the fire-bombing of Hamburg. To reconstruct the journeys individuals had travelled to get to that point, what they loved and hoped for – and how they went on rationalising what they were fighting for – that’s taken me ten years. So, of course I’d no idea what readers would be interested in that long ahead. I’ve been moved by their responses – and I’m deeply touched by this honour.”
Nicholas Stargardt

Jessie Childs

2015 winner

Jessie Childs won the 2015 PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize for history for ‘God’s Traitors: Terror and Faith in Elizabethan England’, published by Bodley Head.

The critically acclaimed ‘God’s Traitors’ explores the predicament of Catholics in Elizabethan England, with a focus on one family, the Vauxes of Harrowden Hall.

“There were times, writing this book, when it didn’t feel like history at all. Thank you very much to English PEN, to the late Marjorie Hessell-Tiltman and to the judges, who had an impossible decision to make. I am thrilled to bits.”
Jessie Childs

David Reynolds

2014 winner

David Reynolds won the 2014 PEN Hessell-Tiltman prize for ‘In The Long Shadow: The Great War and the Twentieth Century’.

In this book, David Reynolds seeks to re-address our overriding sense of the First World War as a futile bloodbath. Exploring major themes such as democracy and empire, nationalism and capitalism and re-examining the differing impacts of the War on Britain, Ireland and the United States, The Long Shadow throws light on the whole of the last century and demonstrates that 1914-18 is a conflict that Britain, more than any other nation, is still struggling to comprehend. Stunningly broad in its historical perspective, The Long Shadow is a scholarly, thoughtful and seismic re-presentation of the Great War.

David Reynolds is Professor of International History and a Fellow of Christ’s College. His visiting positions include posts at Harvard, Nihon University in Tokyo and Sciences Po in Paris. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2005 and a member of the Society of American Historians in 2011. The Long Shadow will be a major 4-part BBC series in 2014.

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Keith Lowe

2013 winner

Keith Lowe won the 2013 PEN Hessell-Tiltman prize for ‘Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II’

The end of the Second World War saw a terrible explosion of violence across Europe. Prisoners murdered jailers. Soldiers visited atrocities on civilians. Resistance fighters killed and pilloried collaborators. Ethnic cleansing, civil war, rape and murder were rife in the days, months and years after hostilities ended. Exploring a Europe consumed by vengeance, Savage Continent is a shocking portrait of an until-now unacknowledged time of lawlessness and terror.

Publisher: Viking/Penguin

James Gleick

2012 winner

James Gleick won the 2012 PEN Hessell-Tiltman prize for ‘The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood’.

In ‘The Information’ James Gleick tells the story of how human beings use, transmit and keep what they know. From African talking drums to Wikipedia, from Morse code to the ‘bit’, it is a fascinating account of the modern age’s defining idea and a brilliant exploration of how information has revolutionised our lives.

Publisher: Fourth Estate

Toby Wilkinson

2011 winner

Tony Wilkinson won the 2011 PEN Hessell-Tiltman prize for ‘The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt: the History of a Civilisation from 3000 BC to Cleopatra’.

This is a story studded with extraordinary achievements and historic moments, from the building of the pyramids and the conquest of Nubia, through Akhenaten’s religious revolution, the power and beauty of Nefertiti, the glory of Tutankhamun’s burial chamber, and the ruthlessness of Ramesses, to Alexander the Great’s invasion, and Cleopatra’s fatal entanglement with Rome.

As the world’s first nation-state, the history of Ancient Egypt is above all the story of the attempt to unite a disparate realm and defend it against hostile forces from within and without. Combining grand narrative sweep with detailed knowledge of hieroglyphs and the iconography of power, Toby Wilkinson reveals Ancient Egypt in all its complexity.

Publisher: Bloomsbury

Diarmaid MacCulloch

2010 winner

Diarmaid MacCulloch won the 2010 PEN Hessell-Tiltman prize for ‘A History of Christianity’.

How did an obscure personality cult come to be the world’s biggest religion, with a third of humanity its followers? This book, now the most comprehensive and up to date single volume work in English, describes not only the main facts, ideas and personalities of Christian history, its organization and spirituality, but how it has changed politics, sex, and human society.

Taking in wars, empires, reformers, apostles, sects, churches and crusaders, Diarmaid MacCulloch shows how Christianity has brought humanity to the most terrible acts of cruelty – and inspired its most sublime accomplishments.

Publisher: Penguin

Mark Thompson

2009 winner

Mark Thompson won the 2009 PEN Hessell-Tiltman prize for ‘The White War: Life & Death on the Italian Front 1915-1919’.

In May 1915, Italy declared war on the Habsburg Empire, hoping to seize its ‘lost’ territories of Trieste and Tyrol. The result was one of the most hopeless and senseless modern wars – and one that inspired great cruelty and destruction. Nearly three-quarters of a million Italians – and half as many Austro-Hungarian troops – were killed. Most of the deaths occurred on the bare grey hills north of Trieste, and in the snows of the Dolomite Alps. Outsiders who witnessed these battles were awestruck by the difficulty of attacking on such terrain. General Luigi Cadorna, most ruthless of all the Great War commanders, restored the Roman practice of ‘decimation’, executing random members of units that retreated or rebelled. Italy sank into chaos and, eventually, fascism. Its liberal traditions did not recover for a quarter of a century – some would say they have never recovered.

Mark Thompson relates this nearly incredible saga with great skill and pathos. Much more than a history of terrible violence, the book tells the whole story of the war: the nationalist frenzy that led up to it, the decisions that shaped it, the poetry it inspired, its haunting landscapes and political intrigues; the personalities of its statesmen and generals; and also the experience of ordinary soldiers – among them some of modern Italy’s greatest writers.

A work of epic scale, The White War does full justice to one of the most remarkable untold stories of the First World War.

Publisher: Faber & Faber

Clair Wills

2008 winner

Clair Wills won the 2008 PEN Hessell-Tiltman prize for ‘That Neutral Island’.

Of the countries that remained neutral during the Second World War, none was more controversial than Ireland, with accusations of betrayal and hypocrisy poisoning the media. Whereas previous histories of Ireland in the war years have focused on high politics, That Neutral Island brings to life the atmosphere of a country forced to live under rationing, heavy censorship and the threat of invasion. It unearths the motivations of those thousands who left Ireland to fight in the British forces and shows how ordinary people tried to make sense of the Nazi threat through the lens of antagonism towards Britain.

Publisher: Faber & Faber

Vic Gatrell

2007 winner

Vic Gatrell won the 2007 PEN Hessell-Tiltman prize for ‘City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in Eighteenth-Century London’.

Between 1770 and 1830, London was the world’s largest and richest city, the centre of hectic social ferment and of spectacular sexual liberation. It prompted revolutionary modes of thought, novel sensibilities and constant debate about the relations between the sexes. It also stimulated outrageous behaviour, from James Boswell’s copulating on WestminsterBridge to the Prince Regent’s attempt to seduce a woman by pleading, sobbing and stabbing himself with a pen-knife.And nowhere was London’s lewdness and iconoclasm more vividly represented than in its satire. Combining words and images to offer a brilliantly original panorama of that time, City of Laughter is a ground-breaking reappraisal of a period of seismic change and a unique account of the origins of our attitudes to sex, celebrity and satire today.

Publisher: Atlantic Books

Bryan Ward Perkins

2006 winner

Bryan Ward Perkins won the 2006 PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize for ‘The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization’.

Vicious barbarian invasions during the fifth century resulted in the cataclysmic end of the world’s most powerful civilization, and a ‘dark age’ for its conquered peoples. Or did it? The dominant view of this period today is that the ‘fall of Rome’ was a largely peaceful transition to Germanic rule, and the start of a positive cultural transformation.

Bryan Ward-Perkins encourages every reader to think again by reclaiming the drama and violence of the last days of the Roman world, and reminding us of the very real horrors of barbarian occupation. Attacking new sources with relish and making use of a range of contemporary archaeological evidence, he looks at both the wider explanations for the disintegration of the Roman world and also the consequences for the lives of everyday Romans, in a world of economic collapse, marauding barbarians, and the rise of a new religious orthodoxy. He also looks at how and why successive generations have understood this period differently, and why the story is still so significant today.

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Paul Fussell

2005 winner

The 2005 Hessell-Tiltman Prize was split between Richard Overy for ‘The Dictators: Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia’ and Paul Fussell for ‘The Boys’ Crusade’.

The Boys’ Crusade is Paul Fussell’s unflinching and unforgettable account of the American infantryman’s experiences in Europe during World War II. Based in part on the author’s own experiences, it provides a stirring narrative of what the war was actually like, from the point of view of the children who fought it. While dealing definitively with issues of strategy, leadership, context, and tactics, Fussell has an additional purpose: to tear away the veil of feel-good mythology that so often obscures and sanitizes war’s brutal essence.

Publisher: Weidenfeld

Richard Overy

2005 winner

The 2005 Hessell-Tiltman Prize was split between Richard Overy for ‘The Dictators: Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia’ and Paul Fussell for ‘The Boys’ Crusade’.

Half a century after their deaths, the dictatorships of Stalin and Hitler still cast a long and terrible shadow over the modern world. They were the most destructive and lethal regimes in history, murdering millions. They fought the largest and costliest war in all history. Yet millions of Germans and Russians enthusiastically supported them and the values they stood for. In this first major study of the two dictatorships side-by-side Richard Overy sets out to answer the question: How was dictatorship possible? How did they function? What was the bond that tied dictator and people so powerfully together? He paints a remarkable and vivid account of the different ways in which Stalin and Hitler rose to power, and abused and dominated their people. It is a chilling analysis of powerful ideals corrupted by the vanity of ambitious and unscrupulous men.

Publisher: Nicholson Allen Lane/Penguin

Tom Holland

2004 winner

Tom Holland won the 2004 PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize for ‘Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic’.

The Roman Republic was the most remarkable state in history. What began as a small community of peasants camped among marshes and hills ended up ruling the known world. Rubicon paints a vivid portrait of the Republic at the climax of its greatness – the same greatness which would herald the catastrophe of its fall.
It is a story of incomparable drama. This was the century of Julius Caesar, the gambler whose addiction to glory led him to the banks of the Rubicon, and beyond; of Cicero, whose defence of freedom would make him a byword for eloquence; of Spartacus, the slave who dared to challenge a superpower; of Cleopatra, the queen who did the same.

Tom Holland brings to life this strange and unsettling civilization, with its extremes of ambition and self-sacrifice, bloodshed and desire. Yet alien as it was, the Republic still holds up a mirror to us. Its citizens were obsessed by celebrity chefs, all-night dancing and exotic pets; they fought elections in law courts and were addicted to spin; they toppled foreign tyrants in the name of self-defence. Two thousand years may have passed, but we remain the Romans’ heirs.

Publisher: Abacus

Jenny Uglow

2003 winner

Jenny Uglow won the 2003 PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize for the book ‘The Lunar Men’.

Led by Erasmus Darwin, the Lunar Society of Birmingham was formed from a group of amateur experimenters, tradesmen and artisans who met and made friends in the Midlands in the 1760s. Most came from humble families, all lived far from the centre of things, but they were young and their optimism was boundless: together they would change the world. Among them were the ambitious toy-maker Matthew Boulton and his partner James Watt, of steam-engine fame; the potter Josiah Wedgwood; the larger-than-life Erasmus Darwin, physician, poet, inventor and theorist of evolution (a forerunner of his grandson Charles Darwin). Later came Joseph Priestley, discoverer of oxygen and fighting radical.

Led by Erasmus Darwin they joined a small band of allies, formed the Lunar Society of Birmingham (so called because it met at each full moon) and kick-started the Industrial Revolution. Blending science, art, and commerce, the Lunar Men built canals, launched balloons, named plants, gases and minerals, changed the face of England and the china in its drawing rooms, and plotted to revolutionise its soul.

Jenny Uglow’s The Lunar Men is a vivid and swarming group portrait that brings to life the friendships, political passions, love affairs, and love of knowledge (and power) that drove these extraordinary men. It echoes the thud of pistons and the wheeze and snort of engines, and brings to life the tradesmen, artisans, and tycoons who shaped and fired the modern age.

Publisher: Faber

Margaret Macmillan

2002 winner

Margaret Macmillan won the 2002 PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize for her book ‘Peacemakers’.

After the war to end all wars, men and women from all over the world converged on Paris for the Peace Conference. At its heart were the leaders of the three great powers – Woodrow Wilson, Lloyd George and Clemenceau. Kings, prime ministers and foreign ministers with their crowds of advisers rubbed shoulders with journalists and lobbyists for a hundred causes – from Armenian independence to women’s rights. Everyone had business in Paris that year – T.E. Lawrence, Queen Marie of Romania, Maynard Keynes, Ho Chi Minh. There had never been anything like it before, and there never has been since.

For six extraordinary months the city was effectively the centre of world government as the peacemakers wound up bankrupt empires and created new countries. They pushed Russia to the sidelines, alienated China and dismissed the Arabs, struggled with the problems of Kosovo, of the Kurds, and of a homeland for the Jews.

The peacemakers, so it has been said, failed dismally; failed above all to prevent another war. Margaret MacMillan argues that they have unfairly been made scapegoats for the mistakes of those who came later. They tried to be evenhanded, but their goals – to make defeated countries pay without destroying them, to satisfy impossible nationalist dreams, to prevent the spread of Bolshevism and to establish a world order based on democracy and reason – could not be achieved by diplomacy. This book offers a prismatic view of the moment when much of the modern world was first sketched out.

Publisher: John Murray Press