Tiya Miles wins 2022 Cundill History Prize for ‘exceptional’ story of enslaved women

Tiya Miles has won the 2022 Cundill History Prize for All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake (Random House).

The professor at the Harvard-Radcliffe Institute and director of the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University was awarded the $75,000 (£62,000) prize, administered by McGill University, in a return to an in-person gala at The Windsor Ballrooms in Montreal on 1st December.

In a unanimous decision, the 2022 jurors decided to award Miles the prize for her “superbly written” story of an enslaved mother and her daughter, which traces the lives of three generations of Black women through one object: a cotton sack.

Facing a scarcity of archival sources on these women’s lives, Miles turns to material culture, art and the environment to piece together a singular history of slavery with “the narrative propulsion of a novel.”

Chair of the judges J R McNeill said: “Tiya Miles’ All That She Carried is the winner, in a field of superb books, because of its clear and moving prose, its imaginative research, and the way the author illuminates the human condition through a family story. The world of enslaved women in the antebellum South is, by the standards of US history, extremely poorly documented, but Miles has risen to that challenge in ways that show the best of the historian’s craft. For me, the vividness and immediacy of the writing is the strongest suit of this powerful book.”

The two fellow finalists, Ada Ferrer and Vladislav M Zubok, each receive $10,000.

The Cundill History Prize is the largest prize for a book of non-fiction in English. The prize 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.