Hannah Durkin won the £50,000 (about $66,000) Wolfson History Prize for her book Survivors: The Lost Stories of the Last Captives of the Atlantic Slave Trade, published in the U.S. by Amistad as The Survivors of the Clotilda. The five shortlisted authors each took home £5,000 (about $6,600).
The judges called the winning work "a superb reconstruction of the lives of the survivors of the slave ship, Clotilda. This searing book conveys the survivors' sufferings and remarkable resilience, bringing to life their personal stories in a compelling way."
Organizers said, "This is an immersive and revelatory history of the survivors of the Clotilda, the last slave ship to land on American soil, whose lives diverged and intersected in profound ways.
"The Clotilda docked in Mobile Bay, Alabama, in July 1860--more than 50 years after a federal law was passed banning the importation of captive Africans, and nine months before the beginning of the Civil War. The last of its survivors lived well into the twentieth century. They were the last witnesses to the final act of a terrible period in world history.
"In this epic work, Dr. Hannah Durkin tells the stories of the Clotilda's 110 captives, drawing on her intensive archival, historical and sociological research. Survivors follows their lives from their kidnappings in what is modern-day Nigeria through a terrifying 45-day journey across the Middle Passage; from the subsequent sale of the ship's 103 surviving children and young people into slavery across Alabama to the dawn of the Civil Rights movement in Selma."