Maya Jasanoff has won the $75,000 Cundill History Prize for The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World (Penguin Press), which organizers called a "genrebending account of the life and world of the Polish-born British writer Joseph Conrad."
Chair of judges Mark Gilbert said, "The Dawn Watch is a striking portrait of an exceptional man and his times. Maya Jasanoff is a visitor in Conrad's world, a recreator of it and in some ways its judge. Capturing this world required remarkable research, an eye for telling detail, a roving spirit similar to Conrad's own, and a gift for historical narrative. Fortunately, Jasanoff's pen, like Conrad's, is a magic wand."
Jasanoff is Coolidge Professor of History at Harvard University and was previously a finalist for the Cundill History Prize for her second book, Liberty's Exile (2011). Her first book, Edge of Empire, won the 2005 Duff Cooper Prize.
Also the two runners up each received a Recognition of Excellence Award and $10,000:
Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder by Caroline Fraser (Metropolitan Books)
A Cold Welcome: The Little Ice Age and Europe's Encounter with North America by Sam White (Harvard University Press)
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Robin Robertson won the £10,000 (about $12,800) Goldsmiths Prize, which recognizes "a book that is deemed genuinely novel and which embodies the spirit of invention that characterizes the genre at its best," for The Long Take.
Chair of Judges Adam Mars-Jones commented: "The judges are proud to salute Robin Robertson's The Long Take, a film noir verse novel full of blinding sunlight and lingering shadows, technically accomplished, formally resourceful and emotionally unsparing."