Lionel Gelber Prize

The Lionel Gelber Prize is a literary award for English non-fiction books on foreign policy.^[1] Founded in 1989 by Canadian diplomat Lionel Gelber, the prize honors "the world's best non-fiction book in English on foreign affairs that seeks to deepen public debate on significant international issues."^[2] A prize of CA$50,000, is awarded to the winner. The award is presented annually by the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto.

Lionel Gelber Prize
Awarded for	"the world's best non-fiction book in English on foreign affairs that seeks to deepen public debate on significant international issues."
Presented by	Lionel Gelber Prize Board
Reward(s)	CA$50,000
First award	1990

Recipients are judged by an international jury of experts. In 1999, The Economist called the award "the world's most important award for non-fiction".^[3] Past winners have included, Lawrence Wright, Jonathan Spence, David McCullough, Kanan Makiya, Michael Ignatieff, Eric Hobsbawm, Robert Kinloch Massie, Adam Hochschild (a two-time winner), Robert Skidelsky, Baron Skidelsky, Walter Russell Mead, Chrystia Freeland, and Steve Coll.

Lionel Gelber

Lionel Gelber was a Canadian author, scholar, historian, and diplomat. During his career, he wrote eight books and many articles on foreign relations, including The Rise of Anglo-American Friendship: a Study of World Politics 1898 to 1906,^[4] which examined the "rise of American global power, with all the risk, hope and complexity such a geopolitical shift entailed at the beginning of the 20th Century."^[4] He followed this work with Peace by Power: The Plain Man's Guide to the Key Issues of the War and the Post-War World in 1942 and America in Britain's Place in 1961.^[4] Gelber studied at Upper Canada College and the University of Toronto before winning the Rhodes Scholarship and beginning his studies at Balliol College, Oxford.^[4] In 1989, the Lionel Gelber prize was created to honor works published in Gelber's field.^[4]

Recipients

Award winners

Year	Author	Title	Result	Ref.
1990	Jonathan D. Spence	The Search for Modern China	Winner
1991	Dorothy V. Jones	Code of Peace: Ethics and Security in the World of Warlord States	Winner
1992	David McCullough	Truman	Winner
1993	Kanan Makiya	Cruelty and Silence: War, Tyranny, Uprising and the Arab World	Winner
1994	Michael Ignatieff	Blood and Belonging: Journeys Into the New Nationalism	Winner
1995	Eric Hobsbawm	Age of Extremes: The Short 20th Century	Winner
1996	Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov	Inside the Kremlin's Cold War: From Stalin to Khrushchev	Winner
1997	Donovan Webster	Aftermath: The Remnants of War	Winner
1998	Robert Kinloch Massie	Loosing the Bonds: The United States and South Africa In the Apartheid Years	Winner
1999	Adam Hochschild	King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism In Colonial Africa	Winner
2000	Patrick Tyler	A Great Wall: Six Presidents and China: An Investigative History	Winner
2001	Robert Skidelsky	John Maynard Keynes, Fighting for Britain 1937-1946	Winner
2002	Walter Russell Mead	Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World	Winner
2003	Ivo H. Daalder and James M. Lindsay	America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy	Winner
2004	Steve Coll	Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001	Winner	[5]
2006	Adam Hochschild	Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves	Winner
2007	Lawrence Wright	The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11	Winner
2008	Paul Collier	The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It	Winner
2009	Lawrence Freedman	A Choice of Enemies: America Confronts the Middle East	Winner
2010	Jay Taylor	The Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the Struggle for Modern China	Winner	[6]
2011	Shelagh Grant	Polar Imperative: A History of Arctic Sovereignty in North America	Winner	[7]
	Serhii M. Plokhy	Yalta: The Price of Peace	Shortlist	[8]
	Ian Morris	Why the West Rules—For Now	Shortlist	[8]
	Doug Saunders	Arrival City: The Final Migration and our Next World	Shortlist	[8]
	Nick Cullather	The Hungry World: America’s Cold War Battle Against Poverty in Asia	Shortlist	[8]
2012	Ezra F. Vogel	Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China	Winner	[9][10]
	Amanda Foreman	A World on Fire: Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War	Shortlist	[11][12]
	Frederick Kempe	Berlin 1961: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Most Dangerous Place on Earth	Shortlist	[11][12]
	John Lewis Gaddis	George F. Kennan: An American Life	Shortlist	[11][12]
	Henry Kissinger	On China	Shortlist	[11][12]
2013	Chrystia Freeland	Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else	Winner	[13][14]
	Anne Applebaum	Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956	Shortlist	[15]
	Paul Bracken	The Second Nuclear Age: Strategy, Danger, and the New Power Politics	Shortlist	[15]
	Kwasi Kwarteng	Ghosts of Empire: Britain’s Legacies in the Modern World	Shortlist	[15]
	Pankaj Mishra	From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia	Shortlist	[15]
2014	Gary J. Bass	The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide	Winner	[16][17]
	Lynne Olson	Those Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America’s Fight Over World War II, 1939—1941	Shortlist	[18]
	Eric Schlosser	Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety	Shortlist	[18]
	Brendan Simms	Europe: The Struggle for Supremacy, from 1453 to the Present	Shortlist	[18]
	Benn Steil	The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order	Shortlist	[18]
2015	Serhii Plokhy	The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union	Winner	[19]
2016	Scott Shane	Objective Troy: A Terrorist, A President, and the Rise of the Drone	Winner	[20][21]
	Barry Eichengreen	Hall of Mirrors: The Great Depression, the Great Recession, and the Uses – and Misuses – of History	Shortlist	[22]
	Niall Ferguson	Kissinger 1923–1968: The Idealist	Shortlist	[22]
	Dominic Lieven	The End of Tsarist Russia: The March to World War 1 & Revolution	Shortlist	[22]
	Susan Pedersen	The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire	Shortlist	[22]
2017	Robert F. Worth	A Rage for Order: The Middle East in Turmoil, from Tahrir Square to ISIS	Winner	[23][24]
	Rosa Brooks	How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon	Shortlist	[25][26]
	Shadi Hamid	Islamic Exceptionalism: How the Struggle Over Islam Is Reshaping the World	Shortlist	[25][26]
	Arkady Ostrovsky	The Invention of Russia: From Gorbachev's Freedom to Putin's War	Shortlist	[25][26]
	Laura Secor	Children of Paradise: The Struggle for the Soul of Iran	Shortlist	[25][26]
2018	Anne Applebaum	Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine	Winner	[27]
	Graham Allison	Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?	Shortlist	[28]
	Lawrence Freedman	The Future of War: A History	Shortlist	[28]
	Oona A. Hathaway and Scott J. Shapiro	The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World	Shortlist	[28]
	Richard McGregor	Asia’s Reckoning: China, Japan, and the Fate of U.S. Power in the Pacific Century	Shortlist	[28]
2019	Adam Tooze	Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World	Winner	[29]
	Rania Abouzeid	No Turning Back: Life, Loss, and Hope in Wartime Syria	Shortlist	[30]
	Elizabeth C. Economy	The Third Revolution: Xi Jinping and the New Chinese State	Shortlist	[30]
	Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt	How Democracies Die	Shortlist	[30]
	Timothy Snyder	The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America	Shortlist	[30]
2020	Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes	The Light that Failed: A Reckoning	Winner	[31][32]
2021	Matthew C. Klein and Michael Pettis	Trade Wars Are Class Wars: How Rising Inequality Distorts the Global Economy and Threatens International Peace	Winner	[33]
2022	Carter Malkasian	The American War in Afghanistan: A History	Winner	[34]
	Emily Bass	To End a Plague: America's Fight to Defeat AIDS in Africa	Shortlist	[35][36]
	Rush Doshi	The Long Game: China's Grand Strategy to Displace American Order	Shortlist	[35][36]
	Niall Ferguson	Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe	Shortlist	[35][36]
	Jeffrey Veidlinger	In the Midst of Civilized Europe: The Pogroms of 1918–1921 and the Onset of the Holocaust	Shortlist	[35][36]
2023	Susan L. Shirk	Overreach: How China Derailed Its Peaceful Rise	Winner	[37][38]
	Chris Miller	Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology	Shortlist	[39]
	Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way	Revolution and Dictatorship: The Violent Origins of Durable Authoritarianism	Shortlist	[39]
	J. Bradford DeLong	Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century	Shortlist	[39]
	Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman	Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century	Shortlist	[39]
2024	Timothy Garton Ash	Homelands: A Personal History of Europe	Winner	[40]
	Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson	Power and Progress: Our 1000-year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity	Shortlist	[41][42]
	Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman	Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy	Shortlist	[41][42]
	Harold James	Seven Crashes: The Economic Crises that Shaped Globalization	Shortlist	[41][42]
	Wendy H. Wong	We, The Data: Human Rights in the Digital Age	Shortlist	[41][42]
2025	Sergey Radchenko	To Run the World: The Kremlin's Cold War Bid for Global Power	Winner	[43][44]
	Mary Bridges	Dollars and Dominion: U.S. Bankers and the Making of a Superpower	Shortlist	[43][44]
	Steve Coll	The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A., and the Origins of America's Invasion of Iraq	Shortlist	[43][44]
	Tim Cook	The Good Allies: How Canada and the United States Fought Together to Defeat Fascism during the Second World War	Shortlist	[43][44]
	Benjamin Nathans	To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement	Shortlist	[43][44]