The Royal Historical Society invites applications for its First Book Prize, 2026 and Early Career Article Prize, 2026. The call for submissions opens on Monday 29 September 2025 and runs to Monday 15 December 2025. Applications for each of these prizes may be made via the Society’s application portal:
- RHS First Book Prize, 2026, for first history monographs published in 2025 by early career historians who received a PhD from a UK or Irish university.
- RHS Early Career Article Prize, 2026, for history articles / book chapters, published in 2025 by authors who are either current PhD students at, or within three years of having received their doctorate from, a UK or Irish university.
The Society looks to make two awards, in 2026, for the RHS First Book Prize (worth £1,000 per award) and a further two awards for the RHS Early Career Article Prize (each worth £250).
Further information on eligibility and how to submit an application for both prizes is available here: for first monographs and for early career articles.
Submissions for both prizes are by self-nomination by the author via the Society’s applications portal.
The Society expects to award the 2026 prizes in July of next year. The winners of the 2025 awards were as follows:
First Book Prize
- Royal Justice and the Making of the Tudor Commonwealth, 1485-1547, by Laura Flannigan (Cambridge University Press, 2024)
- Segregated Species: Pests, Knowledge, and Boundaries in South Africa, 1910–1948, by Jules Skotnes-Brown (Johns Hopkins University Press 2024)
Early Career Article Prize
- William Jones, “You are going to be my Bettman”: Exploitative Sexual Relationships and the Lives of the Pipels in Nazi Concentration Camps’, published in The Journal of Holocaust Research (2024)
- Michaela Kalcher, ‘The Self in the Shadow of the Guillotine: Revolution, Terror and Trauma in a Parisian Diary‘, published in History Workshop Journal (2024)
General enquiries about Society’s Prizes should be sent to: administration@royalhistsoc.org.