Guardian leader writer Tania Branigan has won the 2023 Cundill history prize for her book Red Memory, about the ongoing trauma of China’s Cultural Revolution told through the rarely heard stories of the people who lived through it.
Branigan will receive $75,000 (£60,984) as part of the award, which is the largest cash prize for a book of nonfiction in English. She was announced as the winner at a ceremony in Montreal on Wednesday evening.
Judging chair and historian Philippa Levine said that Branigan’s “sensitive study of the impact of the Cultural Revolution on the lives and psyches of an entire generation in China affected every juror, as it will every reader”.
“All of us found ourselves unable to stop thinking about this extraordinary book,” she added. “All of us were deeply moved by the trauma she so vividly describes and by the skills on which she drew in doing so. This is a must-read.”
The Cultural Revolution was a violent movement launched by Mao Zedong in 1966 to reassert his control over the Communist party. It ran until the Chairman’s death in 1976 and resulted in two million people killed for their supposed anti-Maoist views and another 36 million people persecuted.
Judge and writer Adam Gopnik said that Red Memory is a “haunting” read. “Haunting for the memories, many of them horrible, that it evokes; haunting because so much of that memory has been suppressed or repressed by the Chinese Communist party in the years since; and haunting because of how violent ruptures in social fabric can often seem to heal themselves while leaving a scar behind.”
The two other finalists for this year’s prize were Kate Cooper for Queens of a Fallen World: The Lost Women of Augustine’s Confessions and James Morton Turner for Charged: A History of Batteries and Lessons for a Clean Energy Future. All three finalists received $10,000 (£8,137).
Joining Gopnik and Levine on the judging panel were the historians Marie Favereau, Sol Serrano, Eve M Troutt Powell and Coll Thrush.
Red Memory has also been shortlisted for this year’s Baillie Gifford prize, the winner of which is announced next Thursday, and the British Academy prize for non-fiction. Branigan spent seven years as a correspondent for the Guardian in China, where she wrote Red Memory.
“You feel like you can almost touch the people with whom she is talking,” said Troutt Powell of Branigan’s book. “You feel as if they are talking to you and also you can feel the hesitation, the tension of these interviews in ways that are really priceless and unusual. In some ways, it’s historical anthropology but in a poetic way. Her craft of telling their story and having them tell it with her – that’s what makes this book so powerful.”
Previous winners of the Cundill prize include Anne Applebaum, Julia Lovell and Stuart Schwartz. In 2022, Tiya Miles won the prize for All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake.
