Ottawa-based historian and author Tim Cook is one of five authors shortlisted for the 2025 Lionel Gelber Prize.

The $50,000 award, presented annually by the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, is given to the top book on international affairs published in English.

The shortlisted books are:

• Dollars and Dominion: U.S. Bankers and the Making of a Superpower by Mary Bridges (Princeton University Press)
• The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A., and the Origins of America’s Invasion of Iraq by Steve Coll (Penguin Books)
• The Good Allies: How Canada and the United States Fought Together to Defeat Fascism during the Second World War by Tim Cook (Allen Lane/Penguin Random House Canada)
• To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement by Benjamin Nathans (Princeton University Press)
• To Run the World: The Kremlin’s Cold War Bid for Global Power by Sergey Radchenko (Cambridge University Press)

The shortlisted books were chosen by an international jury comprised of chair Janice Gross Stein, John Bew, Francis J. Gavin, Iain Martin, and Nina Srinivasan Rathbun.

The winner of this year’s award will be announced on March 19.