A London-based Canadian financier and investment manager is establishing the world's largest prize for non-fiction historical literature, and he's getting his alma mater, Montreal's McGill University, to administer it.
Details of the $75,000 (U.S.) prize, named the Cundill International Prize in History at McGill, after Montreal native Peter Cundill, a 1960 McGill commerce graduate, are to be announced at a reception in Montreal later today. The inaugural prize will be awarded Nov. 25, and thereafter presented annually; two runner-up awards will each include $10,000 (U.S.) cash. This year's $75,000 winner is expected to return to Montreal in November, 2009, to deliver a public lecture. Also included in the package, to be endowed by the Cundill Foundation, is the creation of two graduate fellowships, worth $25,000 each, to be awarded to outstanding doctoral candidates in McGill's history department.
The literary prize is expected to draw hundreds of entries, not least because the criteria at this stage are very loose. There is no particular focus with respect to subject matter or era for the inaugural prize; to be eligible a book must only have to have been written in either English or French, published between July 1, 2006, and June 30, 2008, and possess "a profound literary, social and academic impact." Publishers will put forward the books for consideration by a six-member blue-chip jury, with no one publisher entering more than six titles. A short list is to be announced in October.
Cundill won't be attending today's announcement, but he will be represented by Senator Michael Meighen, a long-time friend of Cundhill's and co-chair of Campaign McGill. It was Meighen who was instrumental in getting McGill to assume sponsorship of the history prize, Cundill said in an interview yesterday from his office in London. Initially, Cundill, who's been mulling over such a prize for at least the last four years, had thought he would give it to the Aspen Institute in Washington. But when Meighen got wind of it, the senator told him that "if I didn't do McGill, he ... was going to disown me."
Cundill, who is in his late 60s and has lived in London for 30 years, said he took only two history courses while at McGill. "I can't remember a single fact" from either one, he confessed. Nevertheless, he has an abiding interest in history, focused, at this stage at least, on the Second World War and the career of U.S. General Douglas MacArthur. If there's a link between investment management and historical scholarship, he added, "both study the past to understand the present and predict the future."