Marlene L. Daut shortlisted for 2025 Cundill History Prize

Marlene L. Daut, Professor of French and of Black Studies, has been named one of three finalists for the 2025 Cundill History Prize.

The Cundill History Prize is one of the largest annual book prizes in the world and is dedicated to recognizing the best historical nonfiction that exemplifies literary excellence and broad appeal.

Daut was nominated for her book The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe (Knopf, January 2025). The book is a “dramatic biography of Henry Christophe, the most pivotal figure of the Haitian Revolution, who rose from enslavement to become Haiti’s first and only king,” according to the Cundill Prize committee, which said Daut’s work “uncovers a story of Black freedom and self-determination that reverberated across the Atlantic world.”

The winner of the Cundill History Prize will receive a grand prize of $75,000, and finalists will receive an award of $10,000. This year’s other two finalists include Summer of Fire and Blood by Lyndal Roper and The Age of Choice by Sophia Rosenfeld. 

The prize winner will be announced at the Cundill Festival in Montreal on Thursday, October 30.

Daut’s nomination adds to a growing list of literary accolades she has amassed over the past several years. She is the co-winner of the 2019 Haitian Studies Association Book Prize for her book Baron de Vastey and the Origins of Black Atlantic Humanism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) and a recipient of the 2024 Frederick Douglass Book Prize for her book, Awakening the Ashes: An Intellectual History of the Haitian Revolution (University of North Carolina Press, 2023). 

Daut is also the author of Tropics of Haiti: Race and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789–1865 (Liverpool University Press, 2015), and has written articles for the media including The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Nation, and Essence Magazine, among many others.