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Guardian's Branigan scoops Cundill History Prize for 'extraordinary' debut
Guardian journalist and debut author Tania Branigan has been named winner of the Cundill History Prize worth $75,000 (£61,000) for Red Memory: Living, Remembering and Forgetting China’s Cultural Revolution (Faber).
The announcement was made on Wednesday evening (8th November) in Montreal, Canada, by jury chair Philippa Levine, in the company of the 2023 finalists and jury members.
The Cundill History Prize is the largest financial prize for a book of non-fiction in English. It is awarded to a work of outstanding history writing and is open to books from anywhere in the world, regardless of the author’s nationality, as well as works translated into English.
The jury awarded Branigan, foreign leader writer at the Guardian, for her “haunting” excavation of the Cultural Revolution.
Prize organisers said: “Uncovering 40 years of silence, following countless hours of interviews, Branigan’s Red Memory gives voices to those who lived through Mao’s decade of madness. Written while Branigan was reporting in China, this masterful book examines the scar running through Chinese society and the souls of its citizens, revealing a ‘major trauma’ which looms over the nation.”
Fellow finalists Kate Cooper and James Morton Turner were each awarded $10,000 (£8,155). CBC anchor Nahlah Ayed hosted the ceremony. McGill University administers the Cundill History Prize and hosts the Cundill Festival in Montreal each year.
Levine said: “Haunting and memorable, Tania Branigan’s sensitive study of the impact of the Cultural Revolution on the lives and psyches of an entire generation in China affected every juror, as it will every reader. All of us found ourselves unable to stop thinking about this extraordinary book. All of us were deeply moved by the trauma she so vividly describes and by the skills on which she drew in doing so.”
Lisa Shapiro, dean of the faculty of the arts at McGill University, believes 2023 “has been a tremendous year for the Cundill History Prize”. She added: “The jurors managed to arrive at an exceptional longlist of 14 titles, but they still had their work cut out for them to arrive at a shortlist.
“Tania Branigan’s winning book truly embodies the Cundill History Prize’s aims: it is not only an outstanding achievement in historical scholarship, it also engages the reader and demonstrates the real importance of history writing for understanding our world.”
Sol Serrano said: “Red Memory is a history about the victims of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Tania Branigan is an alchemist who recovers voices from silence. Those voices talk about themselves and about us.”
Red Memory is published by Faber in the UK, bought by associate publisher Laura Hassan in 2022, and W W Norton in the US. Branigan’s writing has also appeared in the Washington Post and the Australian. As well as winning this year’s Cundill History Prize, Branigan has also been shortlisted for The Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction 2023 and The British Academy Prize for Non-Fiction 2023. She was profiled by The Bookseller last November.
