Today, astatine the Cundill History Prize Festival successful Montreal, the jurors awarded the 2026 Cundill History Prize, which celebrates “outstanding past writing,” to John Doe Chinaman: A Forgotten History of Chinese Life nether American Racial Law by Beth Lew-Williams.
“In John Doe Chinaman, Beth Lew-Williams unravels the paradoxes of anti-Chinese radical laws successful the American West from the 1850s to the 1920s, analysing the intentions of these laws, their effects, and however Chinese migrants responded to them,” said jury seat Emily Greenwood.
These laws were portion of a larger radical regime, 1 of whose consequences was to incorporate and suppress the lives of Chinese migrants, reducing them to anonymous stereotypes—the “John Doe Chinaman” of the title. Using a supple operation of information algorithms to process ineligible and bureaucratic records and trenchant storytelling, Lew-Williams documents the ghosting of these lives successful the humanities record, retrieving Chinese voices that amusement america immoderate of what we are missing. This is simply a dazzlingly innovative and hard-hitting work.
Lew-Williams volition beryllium awarded $75,000; finalists Jonathan Cheng and Alexander Lee, volition each instrumentality location $10,000.
English (US) ·