Spanning nearly 3000 years of history, each of these six exceptional books sheds light on how societies are brought together – or driven apart – in the wake of profound change. Celebrating books that combine excellent research with readability, the books shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize 2026 are: 

• The Boundless Deep: Young Tennyson, Science and the Crisis of Belief by Richard Holmes
• Vanished: An Unnatural History of Extinction by Sadiah Qureshi
• Summer of Fire and Blood: The German Peasants’ War by Lyndal Roper
• Liverpool: A Story of Britain by Sam Wetherell
• The Library of Ancient Wisdom: Mesopotamia and the Making of History by Selena Wisnom
• Silence of the Gods: The Untold History of Europe’s Last Pagan Peoples by Francis Young

The Wolfson History Prize is awarded annually and is the most valuable history writing prize in the UK, with the winner receiving £50,000 and the shortlisted authors receiving £5000 each.

The winner will be announced 1 December 2026.

The HA connection

Each year the HA usually has a connection to the Wolfson History Prize, even if it's the number of Medlicott recipients who are on the judging panel. For the 2026 shortlist it would be wrong to have a favourite as we know all of the books are excellent, but we are delighted to see Sam Wetherell on the list.

Dr Wetherell was a popular speaker at HA conference 2023 in Harrogate where he spoke on some of the research that features in his book. For a limited time we have released the recording here so that you can get a feel for the book and an insight into the quality of speakers that attend HA Conference:

Recorded lecture: The burden of obsolescence: race, work and memory on Liverpool’s docks since 1945 

Sam Wetherell

In the 1980s, Liverpool was facing multiple crises. Its docks, once at the heart of Britain’s empire, had lost 15,000 jobs. One in five were unemployed. The city was punctuated by decaying and empty industrial buildings. Its substantial Black population was in frequent violent confrontation with an almost entirely white police force. The engines of industry, empire and trade that had conjured Liverpool as a wealthy city of hundreds of thousands had sputtered and died, leaving an uncertain future. This talk will look at how Liverpool’s crisis of obsolescence was understood and negotiated by politicians, economists, thinkers and Black activists in the post-war era. While Liverpool’s history was once seen as an outlier to the rest of Britain, the talk will argue that it holds the key to understanding the country’s present crisis – one characterised by environmental catastrophe, racial inequality and the management of populations deemed to be superfluous.  

This lecture was originally recorded at the HA Annual Conference in Harrogate, May 2023.