2023 Cundill History Prize short-listed books.Supplied
On Nov. 8, winner of the 2023 Cundill History Prize will be announced in Montreal. Three finalists and their books are under consideration for the annual US$75,000 prize administered by McGill University, which recognizes volumes marked by historical scholarship, originality, literary quality and broad appeal. This year’s authors answered questions about their nominated works.
Tania Branigan.Dan Chung/Supplied
Tania Branigan, London-based journalist, nominated for Red Memory: The Afterlives of China’s Cultural Revolution, an exploration of the Cultural Revolution and how it shapes China today
Was there a review of your book you found to be particularly insightful?
I was especially grateful to Yuan Yang in the Financial Times and Emily Feng at National Public Radio for seeing that I wanted to humanize China and draw parallels with our own experience in the West, not pathologize it. And I was relieved that sinologists I admire gave their approval, with British historian Rana Mitter noting that the book is “not primarily about what happened, but the way that memories of that time shape, and distort, the very different China of today.”
Is there a word you would use to describe China’s relationship with the Cultural Revolution today?
Complicated. It is at once absent and omnipresent. Many people are tormented by it, but others are nostalgic about it. It was a huge, complex, often contradictory movement and so its legacy is equally wide-ranging and diffuse. China is shaped by it in so many ways, yet it is not much discussed and many younger people know very little about it.
Suggested further reading on China’s Cultural Revolution?
So many. Ji Xianlin’s brilliant memoir, The Cowshed, testifies to the sheer confusion of the time as well as the zealotry and violence. Red-Color News Soldier by Li Zhensheng is an extraordinary collection of photos he surreptitiously took of the movement and hid for decades. In fiction, I’d recommend Yiyun Li’s unsparing novel The Vagrants.
James Morton Turner.Supplied
James Morton Turner, professor of environmental studies at Wellesley College, nominated for Charged: A History of Batteries and Lessons for a Clean Energy Future, about clean energy and the history of batteries.
Do you have much hope for a clean and fair energy future?
Scaling up the clean energy transition at the pace needed to address climate change means making enormous investments in the mines, factories and supply chains to produce solar panels, wind turbines and electric vehicles. What concerns me is that we risk swapping one set of resource dependencies and environmental injustices for another. The point of optimism is that most of this infrastructure has yet to be built – that means we have a chance to ensure the supply chains important to enabling a clean energy transition are built in ways that are more socially just and environmentally sustainable.
Writing this book, what wore your batteries down the most?
Batteries are both figuratively and literally black boxes. Unpacking that box as a historian was hard. In Charged, I tell the story of the three battery technologies that played a key role in 20th-century technologies: lead-acid batteries, AA batteries and the lithium-ion battery. Of the three, the only one that really had much of a paper trail – and historians are good at following the paper trail – was the lead-acid battery, mainly because lead is toxic and highly regulated. It took years to figure out how to pry open the industries important to manufacturing AA batteries and lithium-ion batteries.
Suggested further reading on clean energy?
Sticking with the theme of thinking about a clean energy transition from the ground up, there are two books I highly recommend. Megan Black’s The Global Interior: Mineral Frontiers and American Power will change your perspective on the geopolitics of resources. Timothy LeCain’s Mass Destruction: The Men and the Giant Mines that Wired America and Scarred the Planet raises all sorts of profound questions about the implications of a clean energy transition.
Kate Cooper.Hester Leyser/Supplied
Kate Cooper, professor of history at Royal Holloway, University of London, for Queens of a Fallen World: The Lost Women of Augustine’s Confessions, a reconstruction of the lives of the women who shaped the early life of Saint Augustine
Was there a review of your book you found to be particularly insightful?
Philosopher David Lloyd Dusenbury’s review in Engelsberg Ideas picked up on something that I value hugely as a historian: The opportunity we sometimes have to find and to celebrate a trace of a person, in a constrained or degraded situation, who found a way to stand up for what they cared about. It’s incredibly inspiring. In antiquity, that person was often a slave, a child or a woman.
Which of the “lost women” fascinates you the most and why?
I was fascinated by the 10-year-old heiress who became Augustine’s fiancée. In my book I call her Tacita – it’s simply the Latin for “the silent one” – because Augustine never mentions her name. We know so little about her; [Augustine’s autobiographical work] Confessions gives us only her age, and the single fact that she was beautiful. But we do know something about the pressures and dangers faced by a child bride in Roman society. Tacita was betrothed at 10 to a man three times her age, whom she seems to have met only once or twice. In all likelihood, she was utterly thrilled when he broke their engagement.
Suggested further reading on Saint Augustine?
First and foremost, it really is worth reading Augustine’s Confessions. This may seem like a tall order, since it was written around the year 400, the earliest Latin autobiography. But despite its great age it’s entirely gripping; full of stories and observations that are surprisingly recognizable to a modern reader, and there are two wonderful modern translations, by Sarah Ruden and Garry Wills. To pair with it, the great modern biography of Augustine, Peter Brown’s Augustine of Hippo, an intimate psychological study, which is beautifully written and depicts the world of fourth-century Africa and Italy in vivid colours.
Editor’s note: The Cundill Prize has four stages: longlist, shortlist, finalists and winner. This article has been updated to reflect that these authors are finalists for the prize.