Shortlist for 2021 RHS Whitfield Book Prize announced
“Once again, the Whitfield Prize competition attracted a large number of excellent entries, presenting the judges with something of an embarrassment of riches. Engagingly written, compellingly argued and deeply researched, the six shortlisted books demonstrate the vibrancy and intellectual ambition of today’s work on British and Irish history.”
– Professor Paul Readman, Whitfield Prize Committee Chair
The Prize offers £1,000 to the author of a work of British or Irish history.
The 2021 shortlist recognises the scholarly contribution and quality of six excellent history monographs published in 2020.
- England’s Northern Frontier: Conflict and Local Society in the Fifteenth-Century Scottish Marches by Jackson W. Armstrong (Cambridge University Press)
- History and the Written Word: Documents, Literacy, and Language in the Age of the Angevins by Henry Bainton (University of Pennsylvania Press)
- Masculinity and Danger on the Eighteenth-Century Grand Tour by Sarah Goldsmith (University of London Press)
- The Intelligence War against the IRA by Thomas Leahy (Cambridge University Press)
- Irish Women and the Great War by Fionnuala Walsh (Cambridge University Press)
- The Making of an Imperial Polity: Civility and America in the Jacobean Metropolis by Lauren Working (Cambridge University Press)
VIDEO INTRODUCTIONS TO THE SHORTLISTED BOOKS ARE ALSO NOW AVAILABLE.
THE WINNER OF THE 2021 WHITFIELD PRIZE WILL BE ANNOUNCED AT THE ANNUAL RHS AWARDS CEREMONY FOR PUBLISHING, TEACHING AND RESEARCH.
HELD ONLINE AT 5.30PM ON FRIDAY 23 JULY. MORE DETAILS SOON.
About the Prize
The Whitfield Prize was established by the Royal Historical Society in 1976 at the bequest of Professor Archibald Stenton Whitfield, who was a Fellow of the Society until his death in 1974. It is one of the Royal Historical Society’s two annual book awards.
To be eligible for the prize the book must:
- be its author’s first solely written history book;
- be on a subject within a field of British or Irish history;
- be an original and scholarly work of historical research by an author who received their doctoral degree from a British or Irish university;
- have been published in English during the calendar year 2020.
Find out more about the Prize, and its previous winners, on the RHS website.
Don’t forget
Shortlist for the 2021 RHS Gladstone Prize also now available
