Today, the British Academy announced the 2024 shortlist for the British Academy Book Prize for Global Cultural Understanding. The international prize, now in its 12th year, celebrates “groundbreaking works of non-fiction that have made an outstanding contribution to the public understanding of world cultures and their interactions, and are grounded in rigorous and high-quality research.” The prize comes with a £25,000 purse.
“This year’s exceptional shortlist highlights a wide range of topics: the secret world of raw materials; race and the healthcare system; endangered languages; a global history of the opium trade; the origins of mathematics and its unsung trailblazers; and relationships between humans and animals in the context of colonisation,” says Chair of judges Professor Charles Tripp, in a press release. “We were greatly impressed by the quality of writing and the depth of research but also by the lengths our writers are prepared to go to highlight urgent global issues and to honour those who have made a difference. At a time when it feels as if global cultural understanding is somewhat lacking, we hope the British Academy Book Prize and these six books will play a part in changing the way we perceive our shared world.”
The winner will announced on October 22, but in the meantime, here’s the shortlist:
Ed Conway, Material World: A Substantial Story of Our Past and Future
(WH Allen / Ebury Publishing / Penguin Random House)
Amitav Ghosh, Smoke and Ashes: Opium’s Hidden Histories
(John Murray / HarperCollins India)
Kate Kitagawa and Timothy Revell, The Secret Lives of Numbers: A Global History of Mathematics & Its Unsung Trailblazers
(Viking / Penguin Random House)
Marcy Norton, The Tame and the Wild: People and Animals after 1492
(Harvard University Press)
Ross Perlin, Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues
(Grove Press UK)
Annabel Sowemimo, Divided: Racism, Medicine and Why We Need to Decolonise Healthcare
(Profile Books / Wellcome Collection)
