# Lionel Gelber Prize

The Lionel Gelber Prize is a literary award for English non-fiction books on foreign policy. Founded in 1989 by Canadian diplomat Lionel Gelber, the prize honors "the world's best non-fiction book in English on foreign affairs that seeks to deepen public debate on significant international issues." A prize of CA$50,000, is awarded to the winner. The award is presented annually by the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto.
Recipients are judged by an international jury of experts. In 1999, The Economist called the award "the world's most important award for non-fiction". Past winners have included, Lawrence Wright, Jonathan Spence, David McCullough, Kanan Makiya, Michael Ignatieff, Eric Hobsbawm, Robert Kinloch Massie, Adam Hochschild (a two-time winner), Robert Skidelsky, Baron Skidelsky, Walter Russell Mead, Chrystia Freeland, and Steve Coll.

## Lionel Gelber

Lionel Gelber was a Canadian author, scholar, historian, and diplomat. During his career, he wrote eight books and many articles on foreign relations, including The Rise of Anglo-American Friendship: a Study of World Politics 1898 to 1906, which examined the "rise of American global power, with all the risk, hope and complexity such a geopolitical shift entailed at the beginning of the 20th Century." He followed this work with Peace by Power: The Plain Man's Guide to the Key Issues of the War and the Post-War World in 1942 and America in Britain's Place in 1961. Gelber studied at Upper Canada College and the University of Toronto before winning the Rhodes Scholarship and beginning his studies at Balliol College, Oxford. In 1989, the Lionel Gelber prize was created to honor works published in Gelber's field.

## Recipients

Award winners :
| Year | Author | Title | Result |
| 1990 | Jonathan D. Spence | The Search for Modern China | Winner |
| 1991 | Dorothy V. Jones | Code of Peace: Ethics and Security in the World of Warlord States | Winner |
| 1992 | David McCullough | Truman | Winner |
| 1993 | Kanan Makiya | Cruelty and Silence: War, Tyranny, Uprising and the Arab World | Winner |
| 1994 | Michael Ignatieff | Blood and Belonging: Journeys Into the New Nationalism | Winner |
| 1995 | Eric Hobsbawm | Age of Extremes: The Short 20th Century | Winner |
| 1996 | Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov | Inside the Kremlin's Cold War: From Stalin to Khrushchev | Winner |
| 1997 | Donovan Webster | Aftermath: The Remnants of War | Winner |
| 1998 | Robert Kinloch Massie | Loosing the Bonds: The United States and South Africa In the Apartheid Years | Winner |
| 1999 | Adam Hochschild | King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism In Colonial Africa | Winner |
| 2000 | Patrick Tyler | A Great Wall: Six Presidents and China: An Investigative History | Winner |
| 2001 | Robert Skidelsky | John Maynard Keynes, Fighting for Britain 1937-1946 | Winner |
| 2002 | Walter Russell Mead | Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World | Winner |
| 2003 | Ivo H. Daalder and James M. Lindsay | America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy | Winner |
| 2004 | Steve Coll | Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 | Winner |
| 2006 | Adam Hochschild | Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves | Winner |
| 2007 | Lawrence Wright | The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 | Winner |
| 2008 | Paul Collier | The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It | Winner |
| 2009 | Lawrence Freedman | A Choice of Enemies: America Confronts the Middle East | Winner |
| 2010 | Jay Taylor | The Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the Struggle for Modern China | Winner |
| 2011 | Shelagh Grant | Polar Imperative: A History of Arctic Sovereignty in North America | Winner |
| 2011 | Serhii M. Plokhy | Yalta: The Price of Peace | Shortlist |
| 2011 | Ian Morris | Why the West Rules—For Now | Shortlist |
| 2011 | Doug Saunders | Arrival City: The Final Migration and our Next World | Shortlist |
| 2011 | Nick Cullather | The Hungry World: America’s Cold War Battle Against Poverty in Asia | Shortlist |
| 2012 | Ezra F. Vogel | Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China | Winner |
| 2012 | Amanda Foreman | A World on Fire: Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War | Shortlist |
| 2012 | Frederick Kempe | Berlin 1961: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Most Dangerous Place on Earth | Shortlist |
| 2012 | John Lewis Gaddis | George F. Kennan: An American Life | Shortlist |
| 2012 | Henry Kissinger | On China | Shortlist |
| 2013 | Chrystia Freeland | Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else | Winner |
| 2013 | Anne Applebaum | Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956 | Shortlist |
| 2013 | Paul Bracken | The Second Nuclear Age: Strategy, Danger, and the New Power Politics | Shortlist |
| 2013 | Kwasi Kwarteng | Ghosts of Empire: Britain’s Legacies in the Modern World | Shortlist |
| 2013 | Pankaj Mishra | From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia | Shortlist |
| 2014 | Gary J. Bass | The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide | Winner |
| 2014 | Lynne Olson | Those Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America’s Fight Over World War II, 1939—1941 | Shortlist |
| 2014 | Eric Schlosser | Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety | Shortlist |
| 2014 | Brendan Simms | Europe: The Struggle for Supremacy, from 1453 to the Present | Shortlist |
| 2014 | Benn Steil | The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order | Shortlist |
| 2015 | Serhii Plokhy | The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union | Winner |
| 2016 | Scott Shane | Objective Troy: A Terrorist, A President, and the Rise of the Drone | Winner |
| 2016 | Barry Eichengreen | Hall of Mirrors: The Great Depression, the Great Recession, and the Uses – and Misuses – of History | Shortlist |
| 2016 | Niall Ferguson | Kissinger 1923–1968: The Idealist | Shortlist |
| 2016 | Dominic Lieven | The End of Tsarist Russia: The March to World War 1 & Revolution | Shortlist |
| 2016 | Susan Pedersen | The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire | Shortlist |
| 2017 | Robert F. Worth | A Rage for Order: The Middle East in Turmoil, from Tahrir Square to ISIS | Winner |
| 2017 | Rosa Brooks | How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon | Shortlist |
| 2017 | Shadi Hamid | Islamic Exceptionalism: How the Struggle Over Islam Is Reshaping the World | Shortlist |
| 2017 | Arkady Ostrovsky | The Invention of Russia: From Gorbachev's Freedom to Putin's War | Shortlist |
| 2017 | Laura Secor | Children of Paradise: The Struggle for the Soul of Iran | Shortlist |
| 2018 | Anne Applebaum | Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine | Winner |
| 2018 | Graham Allison | Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? | Shortlist |
| 2018 | Lawrence Freedman | The Future of War: A History | Shortlist |
| 2018 | Oona A. Hathaway and Scott J. Shapiro | The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World | Shortlist |
| 2018 | Richard McGregor | Asia’s Reckoning: China, Japan, and the Fate of U.S. Power in the Pacific Century | Shortlist |
| 2019 | Adam Tooze | Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World | Winner |
| 2019 | Rania Abouzeid | No Turning Back: Life, Loss, and Hope in Wartime Syria | Shortlist |
| 2019 | Elizabeth C. Economy | The Third Revolution: Xi Jinping and the New Chinese State | Shortlist |
| 2019 | Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt | How Democracies Die | Shortlist |
| 2019 | Timothy Snyder | The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America | Shortlist |
| 2020 | Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes | The Light that Failed: A Reckoning | Winner |
| 2021 | Matthew C. Klein and Michael Pettis | Trade Wars Are Class Wars: How Rising Inequality Distorts the Global Economy and Threatens International Peace | Winner |
| 2022 | Carter Malkasian | The American War in Afghanistan: A History | Winner |
| 2022 | Emily Bass | To End a Plague: America's Fight to Defeat AIDS in Africa | Shortlist |
| 2022 | Rush Doshi | The Long Game: China's Grand Strategy to Displace American Order | Shortlist |
| 2022 | Niall Ferguson | Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe | Shortlist |
| 2022 | Jeffrey Veidlinger | In the Midst of Civilized Europe: The Pogroms of 1918–1921 and the Onset of the Holocaust | Shortlist |
| 2023 | Susan L. Shirk | Overreach: How China Derailed Its Peaceful Rise | Winner |
| 2023 | Chris Miller | Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology | Shortlist |
| 2023 | Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way | Revolution and Dictatorship: The Violent Origins of Durable Authoritarianism | Shortlist |
| 2023 | J. Bradford DeLong | Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century | Shortlist |
| 2023 | Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman | Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century | Shortlist |
| 2024 | Timothy Garton Ash | Homelands: A Personal History of Europe | Winner |
| 2024 | Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson | Power and Progress: Our 1000-year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity | Shortlist |
| 2024 | Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman | Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy | Shortlist |
| 2024 | Harold James | Seven Crashes: The Economic Crises that Shaped Globalization | Shortlist |
| 2024 | Wendy H. Wong | We, The Data: Human Rights in the Digital Age | Shortlist |
| 2025 | Mary Bridges | Dollars and Dominion: U.S. Bankers and the Making of a Superpower | Shortlist |
| 2025 | Steve Coll | The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A., and the Origins of America's Invasion of Iraq | Shortlist |
| 2025 | Tim Cook | The Good Allies: How Canada and the United States Fought Together to Defeat Fascism during the Second World War | Shortlist |
| 2025 | Benjamin Nathans | To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement | Shortlist |
| 2025 | Sergey Radchenko | To Run the World: The Kremlin's Cold War Bid for Global Power | Shortlist |