English literary award
Award
Lionel Gelber Prize Awarded for "the world's best non-fiction book in English on foreign affairs that seeks to deepen public debate on significant international issues." Presented by Lionel Gelber Prize Board Reward(s) CA$ 50,000First award 1990
The Lionel Gelber Prize is a literary award for English non-fiction books on foreign policy .[ 1] Founded in 1989 by Canadian diplomat Lionel Gelber, the prize honors "the world's best non-fiction book in English on foreign affairs that seeks to deepen public debate on significant international issues."[ 2] A prize of CA$50,000 , is awarded to the winner. The award is presented annually by the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto .
Recipients are judged by an international jury of experts. In 1999, The Economist called the award "the world's most important award for non-fiction".[ 3] Past winners have included, Lawrence Wright , Jonathan Spence , David McCullough , Kanan Makiya , Michael Ignatieff , Eric Hobsbawm , Robert Kinloch Massie , Adam Hochschild (a two-time winner), Robert Skidelsky, Baron Skidelsky , Walter Russell Mead , Chrystia Freeland , and Steve Coll .
Lionel Gelber
Lionel Gelber was a Canadian author, scholar, historian, and diplomat. During his career, he wrote eight books and many articles on foreign relations, including The Rise of Anglo-American Friendship: a Study of World Politics 1898 to 1906 ,[ 4] which examined the "rise of American global power, with all the risk, hope and complexity such a geopolitical shift entailed at the beginning of the 20th Century."[ 4] He followed this work with Peace by Power: The Plain Man's Guide to the Key Issues of the War and the Post-War World in 1942 and America in Britain's Place in 1961 .[ 4] Gelber studied at Upper Canada College and the University of Toronto before winning the Rhodes Scholarship and beginning his studies at Balliol College, Oxford .[ 4] In 1989, the Lionel Gelber prize was created to honor works published in Gelber's field.[ 4]
Recipients
Award winners
Year
Author
Title
Result
Ref.
1990
Jonathan D. Spence
The Search for Modern China
Winner
1991
Dorothy V. Jones
Code of Peace: Ethics and Security in the World of Warlord States
Winner
1992
David McCullough
Truman
Winner
1993
Kanan Makiya
Cruelty and Silence: War, Tyranny, Uprising and the Arab World
Winner
1994
Michael Ignatieff
Blood and Belonging: Journeys Into the New Nationalism
Winner
1995
Eric Hobsbawm
Age of Extremes: The Short 20th Century
Winner
1996
Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov
Inside the Kremlin's Cold War: From Stalin to Khrushchev
Winner
1997
Donovan Webster
Aftermath: The Remnants of War
Winner
1998
Robert Kinloch Massie
Loosing the Bonds: The United States and South Africa In the Apartheid Years
Winner
1999
Adam Hochschild
King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism In Colonial Africa
Winner
2000
Patrick Tyler
A Great Wall: Six Presidents and China: An Investigative History
Winner
2001
Robert Skidelsky
John Maynard Keynes, Fighting for Britain 1937-1946
Winner
2002
Walter Russell Mead
Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World
Winner
2003
Ivo H. Daalder and James M. Lindsay
America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy
Winner
2004
Steve Coll
Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001
Winner
[ 5]
2006
Adam Hochschild
Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves
Winner
2007
Lawrence Wright
The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11
Winner
2008
Paul Collier
The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It
Winner
2009
Lawrence Freedman
A Choice of Enemies: America Confronts the Middle East
Winner
2010
Jay Taylor
The Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the Struggle for Modern China
Winner
[ 6]
2011
Shelagh Grant
Polar Imperative: A History of Arctic Sovereignty in North America
Winner
[ 7]
Serhii M. Plokhy
Yalta: The Price of Peace
Shortlist
[ 8]
Ian Morris
Why the West Rules—For Now
Shortlist
[ 8]
Doug Saunders
Arrival City: The Final Migration and our Next World
Shortlist
[ 8]
Nick Cullather
The Hungry World: America’s Cold War Battle Against Poverty in Asia
Shortlist
[ 8]
2012
Ezra F. Vogel
Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China
Winner
[ 9] [ 10]
Amanda Foreman
A World on Fire: Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War
Shortlist
[ 11] [ 12]
Frederick Kempe
Berlin 1961: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Most Dangerous Place on Earth
Shortlist
[ 11] [ 12]
John Lewis Gaddis
George F. Kennan: An American Life
Shortlist
[ 11] [ 12]
Henry Kissinger
On China
Shortlist
[ 11] [ 12]
2013
Chrystia Freeland
Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else
Winner
[ 13] [ 14]
Anne Applebaum
Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956
Shortlist
[ 15]
Paul Bracken
The Second Nuclear Age: Strategy, Danger, and the New Power Politics
Shortlist
[ 15]
Kwasi Kwarteng
Ghosts of Empire: Britain’s Legacies in the Modern World
Shortlist
[ 15]
Pankaj Mishra
From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia
Shortlist
[ 15]
2014
Gary J. Bass
The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide
Winner
[ 16] [ 17]
Lynne Olson
Those Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America’s Fight Over World War II, 1939—1941
Shortlist
[ 18]
Eric Schlosser
Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety
Shortlist
[ 18]
Brendan Simms
Europe: The Struggle for Supremacy, from 1453 to the Present
Shortlist
[ 18]
Benn Steil
The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order
Shortlist
[ 18]
2015
Serhii Plokhy
The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union
Winner
[ 19]
2016
Scott Shane
Objective Troy: A Terrorist, A President, and the Rise of the Drone
Winner
[ 20] [ 21]
Barry Eichengreen
Hall of Mirrors: The Great Depression, the Great Recession, and the Uses – and Misuses – of History
Shortlist
[ 22]
Niall Ferguson
Kissinger 1923–1968: The Idealist
Shortlist
[ 22]
Dominic Lieven
The End of Tsarist Russia: The March to World War 1 & Revolution
Shortlist
[ 22]
Susan Pedersen
The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire
Shortlist
[ 22]
2017
Robert F. Worth
A Rage for Order: The Middle East in Turmoil, from Tahrir Square to ISIS
Winner
[ 23] [ 24]
Rosa Brooks
How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon
Shortlist
[ 25] [ 26]
Shadi Hamid
Islamic Exceptionalism: How the Struggle Over Islam Is Reshaping the World
Shortlist
[ 25] [ 26]
Arkady Ostrovsky
The Invention of Russia: From Gorbachev's Freedom to Putin's War
Shortlist
[ 25] [ 26]
Laura Secor
Children of Paradise: The Struggle for the Soul of Iran
Shortlist
[ 25] [ 26]
2018
Anne Applebaum
Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine
Winner
[ 27]
Graham Allison
Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?
Shortlist
[ 28]
Lawrence Freedman
The Future of War: A History
Shortlist
[ 28]
Oona A. Hathaway and Scott J. Shapiro
The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World
Shortlist
[ 28]
Richard McGregor
Asia’s Reckoning: China, Japan, and the Fate of U.S. Power in the Pacific Century
Shortlist
[ 28]
2019
Adam Tooze
Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World
Winner
[ 29]
Rania Abouzeid
No Turning Back: Life, Loss, and Hope in Wartime Syria
Shortlist
[ 30]
Elizabeth C. Economy
The Third Revolution: Xi Jinping and the New Chinese State
Shortlist
[ 30]
Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt
How Democracies Die
Shortlist
[ 30]
Timothy Snyder
The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America
Shortlist
[ 30]
2020
Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes
The Light that Failed: A Reckoning
Winner
[ 31] [ 32]
2021
Matthew C. Klein and Michael Pettis
Trade Wars Are Class Wars: How Rising Inequality Distorts the Global Economy and Threatens International Peace
Winner
[ 33]
2022
Carter Malkasian
The American War in Afghanistan: A History
Winner
[ 34]
Emily Bass
To End a Plague: America's Fight to Defeat AIDS in Africa
Shortlist
[ 35] [ 36]
Rush Doshi
The Long Game: China's Grand Strategy to Displace American Order
Shortlist
[ 35] [ 36]
Niall Ferguson
Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe
Shortlist
[ 35] [ 36]
Jeffrey Veidlinger
In the Midst of Civilized Europe: The Pogroms of 1918–1921 and the Onset of the Holocaust
Shortlist
[ 35] [ 36]
2023
Susan L. Shirk
Overreach: How China Derailed Its Peaceful Rise
Winner
[ 37] [ 38]
Chris Miller
Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology
Shortlist
[ 39]
Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way
Revolution and Dictatorship: The Violent Origins of Durable Authoritarianism
Shortlist
[ 39]
J. Bradford DeLong
Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century
Shortlist
[ 39]
Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman
Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century
Shortlist
[ 39]
2024
Timothy Garton Ash
Homelands: A Personal History of Europe
Winner
[ 40]
Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson
Power and Progress: Our 1000-year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity
Shortlist
[ 41] [ 42]
Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman
Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy
Shortlist
[ 41] [ 42]
Harold James
Seven Crashes: The Economic Crises that Shaped Globalization
Shortlist
[ 41] [ 42]
Wendy H. Wong
We, The Data: Human Rights in the Digital Age
Shortlist
[ 41] [ 42]
2025
Sergey Radchenko
To Run the World: The Kremlin's Cold War Bid for Global Power
Winner
[ 43] [ 44]
Mary Bridges
Dollars and Dominion: U.S. Bankers and the Making of a Superpower
Shortlist
[ 43] [ 44]
Steve Coll
The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A., and the Origins of America's Invasion of Iraq
Shortlist
[ 43] [ 44]
Tim Cook
The Good Allies: How Canada and the United States Fought Together to Defeat Fascism during the Second World War
Shortlist
[ 43] [ 44]
Benjamin Nathans
To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement
Shortlist
[ 43] [ 44]
References
^ "The Lionel Gelber Prize | The Munk School" . University of Toronto . Archived from the original on November 12, 2024. Retrieved October 15, 2024 .
^ "About the Prize" . The Lionel Gelber Prize - The Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy . Archived from the original on November 14, 2020. Retrieved November 14, 2020 .
^ "The devil inside" . The Economist . September 9, 1999. Archived from the original on March 24, 2024. Retrieved March 24, 2024 .
^ a b c d e "Bibliography" . The Lionel Gelber Prize - The Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy . Retrieved October 14, 2023 .
^ "HONORS" . The Washington Post . March 3, 2005. Archived from the original on August 21, 2018. Retrieved March 16, 2025 .
^ "Recent Books" . Vanderbilt University . August 22, 2010. Retrieved March 16, 2025 .
^ "Awards: Lionel Gelber Prize" . Shelf Awareness . March 2, 2011. Archived from the original on January 18, 2025. Retrieved March 16, 2025 .
^ a b c d "Awards: Best Translated Books Longlist; Lionel Gelber Shortlist" . Shelf Awareness . January 27, 2011. Archived from the original on January 18, 2025. Retrieved March 16, 2025 .
^ "Vogel wins Gelber Prize for book" . The Harvard Gazette . February 27, 2012. Archived from the original on April 17, 2022. Retrieved April 29, 2022 .
^ "Awards: Lionel Gelber Prize" . Shelf Awareness . February 28, 2012. Retrieved March 16, 2025 .
^ a b c d "Awards: Lionel Gelber Prize Shortlist" . Shelf Awareness . February 15, 2012. Retrieved March 16, 2025 .
^ a b c d Webb-Campbell, Shannon (February 13, 2012). "Lionel Gelber Prize shortlist announced" . Quill & Quire . Archived from the original on March 3, 2024. Retrieved March 16, 2025 .
^ Stuster, J. Dana (March 25, 2013). "The 2013 Gelber Prize winner: Chrystia Freeland's 'Plutocrats' " . Foreign Policy . Archived from the original on November 23, 2014. Retrieved April 28, 2022 .
^ "Awards: Lionel Gelber" . Shelf Awareness . March 29, 2013. Retrieved March 16, 2025 .
^ a b c d Carter, Sue (February 19, 2013). "Chrystia Freeland makes Lionel Gelber Prize shortlist" . Quill & Quire . Archived from the original on December 9, 2015. Retrieved March 16, 2025 .
^ " 'The Blood Telegram' wins the 2014 Lionel Gelber Prize" . CTV News . The Canadian Press. March 31, 2014. Archived from the original on December 10, 2022. Retrieved April 28, 2022 .
^ "Awards: Lionel Gelber Winner; Reading the West Shortlist" . Shelf Awareness . April 2, 2014. Archived from the original on October 6, 2024. Retrieved March 16, 2025 .
^ a b c d "Gelber Prize shortlists five foreign affairs books" . Toronto Star . February 10, 2014. Retrieved March 16, 2025 .
^ "The 2015 Gelber Prize - Serhii Plokhy" . CBC News . April 30, 2015. Archived from the original on May 6, 2015. Retrieved March 16, 2025 .
^ Robertson, Becky (March 1, 2016). "Scott Shane wins Munk School's Lionel Gelber Prize" . Quill & Quire . Archived from the original on October 10, 2024. Retrieved March 16, 2025 .
^ "Drone Warfare: Is Killing Terrorists Legal?" . CBC News . May 11, 2016. Archived from the original on July 22, 2017. Retrieved March 16, 2025 .
^ a b c d Robertson, Becky (February 8, 2016). "Guardians author Susan Pedersen among finalists for Gelber Prize" . Quill & Quire . Archived from the original on September 21, 2024. Retrieved March 16, 2025 .
^ "Awards: B&N Discover, Lionel Gelber" . Shelf Awareness . March 2, 2017. Archived from the original on November 13, 2024. Retrieved March 16, 2025 .
^ Carter, Sue (February 28, 2017). "Robert F. Worth wins Lionel Gelber Prize" . Quill & Quire . Retrieved March 16, 2025 .
^ a b c d "Awards: Lionel Gelber Shortlist" . Shelf Awareness . February 3, 2017. Archived from the original on October 16, 2024. Retrieved March 16, 2025 .
^ a b c d Robertson, Becky (February 1, 2017). "Munk School of Global Affairs announces 2017 Lionel Gelber Prize shortlist" . Quill & Quire . Retrieved March 16, 2025 .
^ "Starving out resistance: Anne Applebaum on Stalin's deliberate famine in Ukraine" . CBC Radio . September 14, 2018. Retrieved March 16, 2025 .
^ a b c d Cerny, Dory (February 14, 2018). "Lionel Gelber Prize shortlist announced" . Quill & Quire . Retrieved March 16, 2025 .
^ Ryan, Porter (February 28, 2019). "Adam Tooze wins Lionel Gelber Prize for book on financial crash" . Quill and Quire . Retrieved March 16, 2025 .
^ a b c d Carter, Sue (January 29, 2019). "Lionel Gelber Prize reveals five-title shortlist" . Quill & Quire . Retrieved March 16, 2025 .
^ Ryan, Porter (March 12, 2020). "American "political psychology" book The Light That Failed wins $15,000 Lionel Gelber Prize" . Quill and Quire . Retrieved March 16, 2025 .
^ "Gelber Prize winners blame 'politics of imitation' for extremism in Central Europe" . CBC Radio . April 21, 2020. Archived from the original on July 7, 2022. Retrieved March 16, 2025 .
^ Ryan, Porter (April 20, 2021). "Book on the human cost of global economics wins $15,000 Lionel Gelber Prize" . Quill & Quire . Retrieved March 16, 2025 .
^ Berki, Attila (April 12, 2022). "Winner of the 2022 Lionel Gelber Prize announced" . Quill & Quire . Archived from the original on April 20, 2022. Retrieved April 28, 2022 .
^ a b c d "Awards: Lionel Gelber, Lukas Shortlists" . Shelf Awareness . February 24, 2022. Retrieved March 16, 2025 .
^ a b c d Drudi, Cassandra (February 10, 2022). "2022 Lionel Gelber Prize shortlist announced" . Quill & Quire . Archived from the original on June 21, 2023. Retrieved March 16, 2025 .
^ Drudi, Cassandra (April 10, 2023). "Susan L. Shirk wins 2023 Lionel Gelber Prize" . Quill & Quire . Archived from the original on June 25, 2023. Retrieved June 25, 2023 .
^ "Awards: Lionel Gelber Winner; Ben Franklin Finalists" . Shelf Awareness . April 11, 2023. Retrieved March 16, 2025 .
^ a b c d Drudi, Cassandra (February 28, 2023). "Shortlist announced for 2023 Lionel Gelber Prize" . Quill & Quire . Archived from the original on January 15, 2025. Retrieved March 16, 2025 .
^ Drudi, Cassandra (March 6, 2024). "Timothy Garton Ash wins 2024 Lionel Gelber Prize" . Quill & Quire . Retrieved March 16, 2025 .
^ a b c d "Awards: Lionel Gelber Nonfiction Shortlist" . Shelf Awareness . February 12, 2024. Archived from the original on October 15, 2024. Retrieved March 16, 2025 .
^ a b c d Drudi, Cassandra (February 13, 2024). "Shortlist announced for 2024 Lionel Gelber Prize" . Quill & Quire . Archived from the original on March 6, 2024. Retrieved March 16, 2025 .
^ a b c d e "Awards: Carol Shields Fiction Longlist; Lionel Gelber Nonfiction Shortlist" . Shelf Awareness . March 7, 2025. Retrieved March 16, 2025 .
^ a b c d e Drudi, Cassandra (March 3, 2025). "Tim Cook among authors shortlisted for 2025 Lionel Gelber Prize" . Quill & Quire . Retrieved March 16, 2025 .
External links