04 July 2025
The judges of the Profile Books and Alexander Aitken Ideas Prize are pleased to announce the longlist for the 2025 Ideas Prize. Now in its fifth iteration, The Ideas Prize is an award for the best debut trade non-fiction proposal from an academic. Izzy Everington, Editorial Director at Profile Books, commented: ‘Thank you to everybody who sent in their submissions. It has been extremely gratifying to see so many fantastic ideas presented from a vast realm of disciplines, from cultural history to politics, numismatics to philosophy. Many congratulations to all of our longlisted authors!’
The 11 longlisted authors and their submissions are as follows:
Marcia Allinson for The Green Network: Finding Life Among the Ruins of the Iron Curtain
University of Leeds
Megan Gooch for Crash: A Disastrous History of Britain Through its Money
University of Oxford
Alexis Wick for Before 1498: The Remarkable Forgotten Story of Ahmad Ibn Majid and the Indian Ocean
Koç University
Alexandra Cox & Stuart Sweeney for The Branded Mayflower: How Convict Transportation Shaped the Founding of America
University of Reading
Charlotte Mathieson for Sunscreen: A Sensory History.
University of Surrey
Hui-Ying Kerr for Kawaii: Cute Rebellion, Disruption and Transnational Girling
Nottingham Trent University
Nicholas Radburn for Firearm Frontier: Enslavement, Environmental Change, and the Making of the Global Arms Trade, 1650–1850
Lancaster University
Jasbeer Musthafa Mamalipurath for The Short History of Ignorance
Queen’s University Belfast
Michael Hannon for The Politics of Truth: From Plato to Post-Truth.
University of Nottingham
Sviatlana Kroitar for The Algorithmic Archipelago: How Digitalisation is Reshaping the Division of Labour
University of Leicester
Eva Miller for Origins: The Search for Where We Come From
University College London
Congratulations to those who have been longlisted, and many thanks to all who entered. The shortlist will be announced in the coming weeks.
The Ideas Prize was first launched in 2019, and offers a £25,000 book contract with Profile Books, as well as representation with Aitken Alexander Associates, to the winning book proposal.