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Penguin Viking title Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II by Keith Lowe has won this year's £3,000 English PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize for history.
Chair of judges, biographer and historian Philip Ziegler, praised the title as "a magnificently researched account of the terrible years that most of continental Europe suffered after the end of the Second World War . . . It is a tribute to Lowe's skill that this bleakly tragic tale is nevertheless compulsive reading: the reader longs for it to stop and yet craves for more. It could not have been better done."
The other five shortlisted titles, all highly commended by the judges, were: Jerry Brotton's A History of the World in Twelve Maps; The Sleepwalkers by Christopher Clark; Governing the World by Mark Mazower (all Allen Lane); The Last Crusade by Nigel Cliff (Atlantic Books), and Jonathan Dimbleby's Destiny in the Desert (Profile Books).
The prize will be awarded at the London Book Fair next Tuesday, 16th April, at 4 p.m. as part of the English PEN Literary Cafe programme.