On this very special episode of the Authors of History Podcast I talk to the newly announced winner of the 2025 Wolfson History Book Prize, author and historian Hannah Durkin.

Hannah is a researcher in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Black Atlantic history and culture with specialist expertise in transatlantic slavery and its legacies. She holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Nottingham and a Postgraduate Diploma in Journalism from Leeds Trinity University. Her research has been featured in the New York Times, London Times, NPR, the BBC, and many other news outlets throughout Africa, Europe, and North America.

Hannah's 2025 award winning Wolfson History Book is:

Survivors: The Lost Stories of the Last Captives of the Atlantic Slave Trade (HarperCollins, 2024).

This book tells the stories of the survivors of the Clotilda, the last slave ship to land on U.S. soil when it docked in Mobile Bay, Alabama in July 1860. The individual voices that this book brings together tell an exceptionally detailed and wide-ranging account of the transatlantic slave trade, slavery and freedom from the perspectives of its survivors. Survivors has been shortlisted for the 2025 Wolfson History Prize, the UK’s most prestigious history prize, and the 2024 Historical Writers’ Association Non-Fiction Crown Award. It was named as one of Amazon’s Best Books of 2024, one of the Washington Post’s “50 Notable Works of Nonfiction from 2024,” and a New Yorker recommended book of 2024.

This episode was recorded before the winner was announced.

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