The 2026 Lionel Gelber Prize Ceremony and Lecture

Join us on Wednesday, April 15 at 12:00pm ET for the 2026 Lionel Gelber Prize Ceremony and Lecture with prize winning author Francis J. Gavin for his book Thinking Historically: A guide to Statecraft and Strategy. The Gelber Prize Ceremony and Lecture will take place online via Zoom.

 

The Lionel Gelber Prize is awarded annually to the world's best non-fiction book in English on foreign affairs that seeks to deepen public debate on significant international issues. The Prize is presented by the Lionel Gelber Prize Board in partnership with the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy at the University of Toronto.

 

 

Francis Gavin has written a profound work of philosophy of history that is at the same time eminently readable. He writes not about history but rather about historical sensibility, a way of understanding and thinking about the world with all its complexities and uncertainties. Historical sensibility creates discomfort with linear reasoning and single causes. It embraces complexity, multiple chains that intersect and connect, and a story that changes with the perspective of time. In one elegant chapter after another, Gavin walks the reader through these complexities and leaves us less sure, more empathic, and wiser. Thinking Historically is a more important book than E.H. Carr’s Twenty Years Crisis in helping us understand the crises of our times.

 

 

Francis J. Gavin is the Giovanni Agnelli Distinguished Professor and the director of the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. His previous books include Gold, Dollars, and Power; Nuclear Weapons and American Grand Strategy; and The Taming of Scarcity and the Problems of Plenty.