A history professor at the Université du Québec à Montréal is among the finalists for the world's richest English-language non-fiction book prize.
Christopher Goscha's Vietnam: A New History is one of 10 books nominated for the Cundill History Prize, it was announced Tuesday.
The prize, which is administered by McGill University, awards $75,000 (U.S.) to a single book of history.
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"Our long list reflects the exciting and varied state of history today," said historian Margaret MacMillan, who is chairing this year's jury, in a news release. "The books on it cover subjects from Vietnam to Native American history and range in time from prehistory to the present."
In addition to MacMillan, this year's jury includes historian Amanda Foreman, journalist and author Jeffrey Simpson and Oxford professors Roy Foster and Rana Mitter. Together they considered more than 300 entries from around the world before deciding on this year's long list.
The other nominees are Daniel Beer for The House of the Dead: Siberian Exile Under the Tsars; Heather Thompson for Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy; Christopher de Bellaigue for The Islamic Enlightenment: The Struggle Between Faith and Reason, 1798 to Modern Times; Christopher de Hamel for Meeting With Remarkable Manuscripts; Frances Fitzgerald for The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America; Joe Jackson for Black Elk: The Life of an American Visionary; Lyndal Roper for Martin Luther; Walter Scheidel for The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century; and S.A. Smith for Russia in Revolution: An Empire in Crisis, 1890 to 1928.
A short list of three books will be announced in late October, while the winner will be announced at a gala in Montreal on Nov. 16.
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This year marks the 10th anniversary of the prize, which was founded by McGill alumnus F. Peter Cundill.