Wolfson History Prize Shortlist Highlights How Societies Weather Seismic Change.
The six books shortlisted for this year’s Wolfson History Prize span vast historical territory yet collectively shed light on the ways in which societies are brought together – or driven apart – in the wake of profound disruption.
The subjects of the 2026 Wolfson History Prize shortlist range from humanity’s ‘first civilisation’, the survival of pre-Christian beliefs in Europe and a groundbreaking history of extinction, to the bloodiest uprising in early modern Europe, a mesmerising new biography of Tennyson and the story of a city’s fight against post-industrial decline.
The Wolfson History Prize, now in its 54th year, is the most valuable history writing prize in the UK, awarding the winner £50,000 and each of the five shortlisted authors £5,000, giving a combined total of £75,000.
Wolfson History Prize Shortlist
Spanning nearly 3,000 years of human history, the six books shortlisted are:
The Boundless Deep: Young Tennyson, Science and the Crisis of Belief by Richard Holmes (William Collins)
Vanished: An Unnatural History of Extinction by Sadiah Qureshi (Allen Lane)
Summer of Fire and Blood: The German Peasants’ War by Lyndal Roper (Basic Books)
Liverpool: A Story of Britain by Sam Wetherell (Apollo)
The Library of Ancient Wisdom: Mesopotamia and the Making of History by Selena Wisnom (Allen Lane)
Silence of the Gods: The Untold History of Europe’s Last Pagan Peoples by Francis Young (Cambridge University Press)The judges for the Wolfson History Prize 2026 are Sudhir Hazareesingh, Helen King, Diarmaid MacCulloch and Helen McCarthy, with the panel chaired by David Cannadine.
Previous winners of the Wolfson History Prize include Antonia Fraser, Eric Hobsbawm, Halik Kochanski, Simon Schama, Amanda Vickery, Antony Beevor, Joanna Bourke, Christopher Bayly and Clare Jackson. The 2025 prize was won by Hannah Durkin for her immersive and revelatory history of the survivors of the Clotilda, Survivors: The Lost Stories of the Last Captives of the Atlantic Slave Trade.
The winner of the Wolfson History Prize 2026 will be revealed on Tuesday 1 December 2026.
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