Marlene L. Daut wins 2025 Haiti Book Prize
Daut was honored for her book, The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe.
Marlene L. Daut, Professor of French and of Black Studies, is the winner of the Haitian Studies Association’s 2025 Haiti Book Prize.
The Haiti Book Prize, awarded every other year, recognizes “the best single-authored book in Haitian studies in the social sciences, with broad application beyond the academy.” The prize committee called Daut’s book “a landmark achievement in Haitian historiography and biography” and “a testament to rigorous scholarship, narrative power, and historical imagination.”
Daut was nominated for her book The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe (Knopf, January 2025). “Her work not only humanizes Christophe and his contemporaries but also illuminates the broader tensions and transformations of the post-revolutionary era,” wrote the HSA prize committee. “The book engages key historiographical debates while offering new insights into the Haitian Revolution, the formation of the early Haitian state, and the legacies of Black Atlantic humanism.”
The award adds to a growing list of literary accolades Daut has amassed over the past several years, including The First and Last King of Haiti being a finalist for the 2025 Cundill History Prize. Daut was also 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.