Seven books have been shortlisted for the 2026 Cundill History Prize.

Eric T. Jennings, chair of the University of Toronto’s department of history, and Canadian journalist Jonathan Cheng, the China bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal, are among the seven authors shortlisted 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.

Jennings is shortlisted for his book about the history of vanilla and Cheng is shortlisted for his book about Kim Il Sung.

The shortlist was selected by a jury comprised of chair Emily Greenwood, historians Ned Blackhawk and Barbara Weinstein, and BBC journalist and author Fergal Keane. Three finalists will be announced on Sept. 30, with the winner to be named at an event in Montreal on Oct. 23.

In a press release, Greenwood said the books on the shortlist cover different areas of history.

“Each book on this list invites readers into an absorbing prose world and leaves them with a different reckoning of history,” she said. “Taken together, they uncover histories that have been forgotten, silenced, or simply not intuited because we lacked the evidence and interpretative frameworks to grasp unobvious connections and to question settled accounts.”

The shortlisted books are:

• The Fallen: The Magdalene Laundries and Ireland’s Legacy of Silence by Louise Brangan (Bodley Head)
• Korean Messiah: Kim Il Sung and the Christian Roots of North Korea’s Personality Cult by Jonathan Cheng (Knopf)
• Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia by Sam Dalrymple (William Collins)
• Stealing America: The Hidden Story of Indigenous Slavery in US History by Linford D. Fisher (Liveright/WW Norton)
• Vanilla: The History of an Extraordinary Bean by Eric T. Jennings (Yale University Press)
• The First Ghetto: Venice and the Origins of Modern Antisemitism by Alexander Lee (Basic Books)
• We The People: A History of the US Constitution by Jill Lepore (Liveright/John Murray Press)
•  John Doe Chinaman: A Forgotten History of Chinese Life Under American Racial Law by Beth Lew-Williams (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press)