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Announcing the shortlist for the 2024 Lionel Gelber Prize
Five titles being considered for best non-fiction book on international affairs published in English
TORONTO, WASHINGTON, LONDON and ROME, Feb. 8, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — The shortlist for the 2024 Lionel Gelber Prize shortlist has been selected by an international panel of practitioners, journalists and scholars. This will be the 34th 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:
- Power and Progress: Our 1000-year struggle over technology and prosperity, Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson (PublicAffairs, Hatchette Book Group)
- Underground Empire: How America weaponized the world economy, Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman (Macmillan, Henry Holt and Co. U.S.A.; Allen Lane, an imprint of Penguin Press, U.K.)
- Homelands: A personal history of Europe, Timothy Garton Ash (Yale University Press)
- Seven Crashes: The economic crises that shaped globalization, Harold James (Yale University Press)
- We, The Data: Human rights in the digital age, Wendy H. Wong (MIT Press)
“The jury has chosen five books that explore topics critical to our understanding of the forces that influence the global economy and international cooperation,” said Judith Gelber, Chair of the Lionel Gelber Prize Board. “They each exemplify the values of the Lionel Gelber Prize with elegant writing on important issues.”
This year’s shortlist was selected by the 2024 Lionel Gelber Prize Jury: Prof. Janice Gross Stein (Jury Chair), Prof. Rosa Brooks (Washington), Prof. Francis J. Gavin (Washington), Iain Martin (London) and Eric Reguly (Rome).
Winner Announcement:
The winner will be announced on March 6, 2024. The winning author will take part in a hybrid event hosted by the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy on March 25, 2024.
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 Facebook and Twitter.
The 2024 Lionel Gelber Prize – Shortlisted Books and Authors
Power and Progress: Our 1000-year struggle over technology and prosperity, Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson (PublicAffairs, Hatchette Book Group)
About the authors:
Daron Acemoglu is Institute Professor of Economics at MIT, the university’s highest faculty honor. For the last twenty-five years, he has been researching the historical origins of prosperity, poverty, and the effects of new technologies on economic growth, employment, and inequality. Acemoglu is the recipient of several awards and honors, including the John Bates Clark Medal, awarded to economists under forty judged to have made the most significant contribution to economic thought and knowledge (2005); the BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge Award in economics, finance, and management for his lifetime contributions (2016), and the Kiel Institute’s Global Economy Prize in economics (2019). He is author (with James Robinson) of The Narrow Corridor and the New York Times bestseller Why Nations Fail.
Simon Johnson is the Ronald A. Kurtz Professor of Entrepreneurship in the Sloan School at MIT, where he is also head of the Global Economics and Management group. Previously chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, he has worked on global economic crises and recoveries for thirty years. Johnson has published more than 300 high-impact pieces in leading publications such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, and Financial Times. He is author (with Jon Gruber) of Jump-Starting America, and (with James Kwak) of White House Burning and the national bestseller 13 Bankers. He works with entrepreneurs, elected officials, and civil society organizations around the world.
Underground Empire: How America weaponized the world economy, Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman (Macmillan, Henry Holt and Co. U.S.A.; Allen Lane, an imprint of Penguin Press, U.K.)
About the authors:
Henry Farrell is the SNF Agora Professor at Johns Hopkins SAIS, the 2019 winner of the Friedrich Schiedel Prize for Politics and Technology, Editor-in-Chief of The Monkey Cage at The Washington Post, and co-founder of the popular academic blog, Crooked Timber. A member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Farrell has written for publications such as The New York Times, the Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The Washington Monthly, The Boston Review, Aeon, New Scientist, and The Nation.
Abraham L. Newman is a professor at the School of Foreign Service and Government Department at Georgetown University. Known for his research on the politics generated by globalization, he serves as a frequent commentator on international affairs, appearing on news programs ranging from Al Jazeera to Deutsche Welle and NPR. His work has been published in leading outlets like The New York Times, The Washington Post, Nature, Science, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Harvard Business Review, and Politico.
Homelands: A personal history of Europe, Timothy Garton Ash (Yale University Press)
About the author: Timothy Garton Ash is professor of European studies at the University of Oxford and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His books include The Magic Lantern, his eyewitness account of the revolutions of 1989; The File: A Personal History, based on reading his own Stasi file; and History of the Present. He lives in Oxford, England.
Seven Crashes: The economic crises that shaped globalization, Harold James (Yale University Press)
About the author: Harold James is the Claude and Lore Kelly Professor in European Studies and professor of history and international affairs at Princeton University. He is the author of numerous books, most recently The War of Words: A Glossary of Globalization (Yale, 2021) and Making a Modern Central Bank: The Bank of England 1979–2003 (Cambridge, 2020).
We, The Data: Human rights in the digital age, Wendy Wong (MIT Press)
About the author: Wendy H. Wong is a Professor of Political Science and Principal’s Research Chair at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan. She is the author of two award-winning books: Internal Affairs: How the Structure of NGOs Transforms Human Rights and (with Sarah S. Stroup) The Authority Trap: Strategic Choices of International NGOs.
Lani Krantz, Communications and Media Relations Specialist, Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, University of Toronto, +1 (647) 407-4384 (text preferred), lani.krantz@utoronto.ca
