Three books have been named finalists for the 2026 Cundill History Prize.

Canadian journalist Jonathan Cheng, the China bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal, is one of three finalists for the 2026 Cundill History Prize.

The $75,000 (U.S.) prize, administered by McGill University, is awarded annually to a book that embodies historical scholarship, originality, literary quality, and broad appeal. Two finalists each receive $10,000.

Three finalists were named on September 30, selected from an eight-book shortlist announced earlier this month. The books were chosen by a jury comprised of chair Emily Greenwood, historians Ned Blackhawk and Barbara Weinstein, and BBC journalist and author Fergal Keane.

Cheng is a finalist for his book Korean Messiah: Kim Il Sung and the Christian Roots of North Korea’s Personality Cult, published by Knopf. In a statement, Greenwood said Cheng’s book “brings together strands of North Korea’s history that are typically kept separate, showing how Kim Il Sung’s idiosyncratic borrowings from the evangelical Christianity of his youth have been a crucial element of the mythmaking of the three-generation political Kim dynasty.”

The other finalists are Alexander Lee, a fellow in the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance at the University of Warwick, for The First Ghetto: Venice and the Origins of Modern Antisemitism (Basic Books), which offers a detailed history of the Venetian Ghetto, the world’s first Jewish ghetto.

Beth-Lew Williams, a professor of History and director of the Program in Asian American Studies at Princeton University, is nominated for John Doe Chinaman: A Forgotten History of Chinese Life Under American Racial Law (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press). Lew-Williams’s book provides a history of the laws that curtailed the everyday lives of Chinese people in the American West.

The winner of this year’s Cundill Prize will be named on October 23.

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