Anne Applebaum is the recipient of the 2013 Cundill Prize in Historical Literature for Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944″“1956 (McClelland & Stewart), announced at an award ceremony in Toronto on Wednesday night.

The $75,000 (U.S.) prize, administered by McGill University’s Dean of Arts and the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada, recognizes books that have a “profound literary, social and academic impact in the area of history.” Iron Curtain was one of three finalists selected from a list of six titles, itself culled from 116 international submissions in English or English translation.

Recognition of Excellence awards of $10,000 each were given to runners-up Christopher Clark for The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (HarperCollins) and Fredrik Logevall for Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam (Random House).