International expert panel reveals the 2025 Lionel Gelber Prize Shortlist

TORONTO, Feb. 11, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- An international panel of practitioners, journalists and scholars has announced the shortlist for the 2025 Lionel Gelber Prize. This will be the 35th awarding of the prize, which honours the world's best book on international affairs published in English. The winner will receive $50,000 CAD and will be chosen from the following five titles:

-- Dollars and Dominion: US Bankers and the Making of a Superpower by Mary Bridges (Princeton University Press) -- The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A., and the Origins of America's Invasion of Iraq by Steve Coll (Penguin Random House) -- The Good Allies: How Canada and the United States Fought Together to Defeat Fascism during the Second World War by Tim Cook (Penguin Random House Canada) -- To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement by Benjamin Nathans (Princeton University Press) -- To Run the World: The Kremlin's Cold War Bid for Global Power by Sergey Radchenko (Cambridge University Press) "The jury has chosen five exceptional books that explore history in ways that are critical to our understanding of current geopolitics," said Judith Gelber, Chair of the Lionel Gelber Prize Board. "These authors have each revealed new ways to think about the intersection of economics, foreign policy and international cooperation."

This year's shortlist was selected by the 2025 Lionel Gelber Prize Jury: Prof. Janice Gross Stein (Jury Chair), Prof. John Bew (London), Prof. Francis J. Gavin (Washington), Iain Martin (London) and Prof. Nina Srinivasan Rathbun (Toronto).

Winner Announcement: The winner will be announced on March 19, 2025. The winning author will take part in a hybrid event hosted by the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy on April 9, 2025.

About The Lionel Gelber Prize: The Lionel Gelber Prize, a literary award for the world's best non-fiction book on international affairs published in English, was founded in 1989 by Canadian diplomat Lionel Gelber. A cash prize of $50,000 CAD is awarded to the winner. The award is presented annually by University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy. For further information, please visit: https://gelber.munkschool.utoronto.ca/ or follow @gelberprize on X and Facebook.

The 2025 Lionel Gelber Prize - Shortlisted Books and Authors

Dollars and Dominion: US Bankers and the Making of a Superpower by Mary Bridges (Princeton University Press)

Mary Bridges is a historian of the twentieth-century United States. Her research investigates the linkages between US foreign relations and business history. Her book Dollars and Dominion: US Bankers and the Making of a Superpower (Princeton University Press, September 2024), argues that U.S. multinational banks provided a crucial infrastructure of both global capitalism and U.S. empire in the early twentieth century. The project explores the changing credit practices of overseas bankers, as US banks navigated new ways to profit from trade finance and their relationship to the US government. She is currently a research fellow at Harvard University's Belfer Center.

The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A., and the Origins of America's Invasion of Iraq by Steve Coll (Penguin Random House)

Steve Coll is a past winner of the Lionel Gelber Prize for his book Ghost Wars in 2004, which also won a Pulitzer Prize. Coll is dean emeritus of the Columbia Journalism School, and from 2007 to 2013 was president of New America, a public policy institute in Washington, D.C. He is an editor at The Economist in London, was a staff writer at The New Yorker for nearly two decades, and before that was a writer and editor at The Washington Post, where he received a Pulitzer Prize for explanatory journalism in 1990. He is the author of nine books, including The Bin Ladens, Private Empire, Directorate S, and The Achilles Trap.

The Good Allies: How Canada and the United States Fought Together to Defeat Fascism during the Second World War by Tim Cook (Penguin Random House Canada)

Tim Cook is Chief Historian and Director of Research at the Canadian War Museum. His bestselling books have won multiple awards, including four Ottawa Book Awards for Literary Non-Fiction and two C.P. Stacey Awards for the best book in Canadian military history. In 2008 he won the J.W. Dafoe Prize for At the Sharp End and again in 2018 for Vimy: The Battle and the Legend. Shock Troops won the 2009 Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction. His most recent book, Lifesavers and Body Snatchers, won the 2023 Ottawa Book Award and was shortlisted for the 2022 Templer Medal for Best Book. Cook is a frequent commentator in the media, and a member of the Royal Society of Canada and the Order of Canada.

To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement by Benjamin Nathans (Princeton University Press)

Benjamin Nathans is the author of Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia, which was awarded the Koret Jewish Book Award, the Vucinich Book Prize, and the Lincoln Book Prize, and was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award in History. A frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement, Nathans is the Alan Charles Kors Associate Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania.

To Run the World: The Kremlin's Cold War Bid for Global Power by Sergey Radchenko (Cambridge University Press)

Sergey Radchenko is the Wilson E. Schmidt Distinguished Professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He has written extensively on the Cold War, nuclear history, and on Russian and Chinese foreign and security policies. He has served as a Global Fellow and a Public Policy Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Centre and as the Zi Jiang Distinguished Professor at East China Normal University (Shanghai). Professor Radchenko's books include To Run the World: The Kremlin's Cold War Bid for Global Power (Cambridge UP, 2024), Two Suns in the Heavens: The Sino-Soviet Struggle for Supremacy (Wilson Center Press & Stanford UP, 2009), and Unwanted Visionaries: The Soviet Failure in Asia (Oxford UP, 2014). Professor Radchenko is a native of Sakhalin Island, Russia.

CONTACT: Lani Mae Krantz, Communications and Media Relations Specialist, Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, (647) 407-4384

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