The Royal Historical Society’s annual book and article prizes recognise excellent historical scholarship and achievement. These prizes are open to early career historians, either for their first monograph or an article published while a PhD student or soon after completion of a doctorate from a UK or Irish university.
Shortlists available for the 2025 prizes
Eight monographs and eight journal articles have been shortlisted, in May, for this year’s Royal Historical Society First Book and Early Career Article prizes.
The shortlists follow an open call for eligible books and articles, published in 2024. Two winners will be announced, in July 2025, for each prize.
Prizes: Changes for 2025
- For 2025, the Society is introducing changes to its book prizes. For this coming round we move to a single book prize for which two winning titles will be identified. All books submitted will be considered for this single book prize, with no distinction made (as in previous years) for books relating to ‘British and Irish’ and ‘non-British and Irish’ history.
- In 2025, we also move to a system of self-nomination by early career authors of first books published in the previous calendar year. This replaces the previous application process of submission by publisher. We hope these changes will encourage submissions of the widest range of first monographs by early career historians which reflects the diversity of the historical profession and practice.
- Submission to the Society’s Early Career Article Prize remains, as in previous years, by self-nomination. From 2025, this prize will be open to historians within three (as opposed to the previous two) years of completion of a PhD at a UK or Irish university.
For further details of these changes and how eligible authors may make a submission, please see the individual pages for the RHS First Book Prize and RHS Early Career Article Prize.
Timetables for the 2025 Prizes
Calls for the submission of self-nominated books and articles for the RHS First Book and Early Career Article prizes opened on Monday 2 December 2024 and closed on Friday 31 January 2025.
Prizes 2024: Winners
In 2024 the Society’s book and article prizes were won by:
- Somak Biswas for his book Passages through India. Indian Gurus, Western Disciples and the Politics of Indophilia, 1890–1940 (2023)
- Sara Caputo for her book Foreign Jack Tars: The British Navy and Transnational Seafarers during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (2023)
- Ellen Smith for her article ‘Widows, Violence and Death: The Construction of Imperial Identity and Memory across British India, 1857–1926’, Gender & History (2023)
- Jonathan Tickle for his article ‘Changing Queenships in Tenth-Century England: Rhetoric and (Self-)Representation in the Case of Eadgifu of Kent at Cooling’, Early Medieval Europe (2023)
General enquiries about Society’s Prizes should be sent to: administration@royalhistsoc.org.
IMAGE: ‘Bird’s-Eye View of the Great New York and Brooklyn Bridge, and Grand Display of Fireworks on Opening Night … May 24, 1883’, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, public domain.