History professor from Columbia University Susan Pedersen has won the 2015 Cundill Prize in Historical Literature at McGill.

Pedersen is a Canadian citizen and took the US$75,000 grand prize on Monday night at a gala in Toronto.

She won for “The Guardians; The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire” (Oxford University Press), described as “a riveting work of global history.”

Two other finalists were named for this year’s prize – American historian Sven Beckert’s “Empire of Cotton; A Global History” (Alfred A. Knopf) and Hamburg-based philosopher Belinda Stangneth’s “Eichmann Before Jerusalem; The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer” (Bodley Head).

They were each awarded a “Recognition of Excellence” prize of US$10,000.

The Cundill Prize is billed as “the world’s most lucrative international award for a non-fiction book.”