2025 Berger Prize winner announced

We are delighted to announce that the winner of the 2025 Berger Prize is Eleonora Pistis, for her book Architecture of Knowledge: Hawksmoor and Oxford (Brepols, 2024). Dr Pistis will be awarded £5,000 through the generosity of the Berger Collection Educational Trust. and each of the shortlisted authors will be awarded £500. The winner was announced by Tim Knox, Director of the Royal Collection, at a reception at the Warburg Institute on 12 November.

Jonny Yarker, the chairman of the panel of assessors, praised the work of the judges in winnowing down the extensive list of entries to a shortlist of only six titles. He also paid tribute to Dr Julia Alexander (1967-2025), a longstanding and much valued Berger Prize assessor, in whose memory this year's prize was awarded.

The shortlist featured The Radical Print by Esther Chadwick, 'hotly anticipated, with its rich research and insights', which the judges envisaged would 'set a new agenda for writing about the eighteenth century print.' Visual Arts and the Auld Alliance: Scotland, France and National Identity, c. 1420-1550 by Bryony Coombs was filled with 'scrupulous archival work and a staggering range of material' making it 'a joy from beginning to end.' Jointly edited by Cristina S. Martinez and Cynthia E. Roman, Female Printmakers, Printsellers and Print Publishers in the Eighteenth Century: The Imprint of Women c.1700-1830 included 'scintillating material' of the highest calibre throughout, making it 'a launching point for whole new areas of study'. Nicholas Olsberg's 'brilliant portrait of Victorian Britain' in The Master Builder: William Butterfield and his Times was praised for its beautiful presentation, exhaustive illustration, and expert writing, making it 'the last word on Butterfield'. Published posthumously, Gavin Stamp's Interwar: British Architecture 1919-39, provided a 'perfect guide to the period and its buildings', with the author's voice, and his lifetime of learning, evident on each page he 're-defines British architecture of the interwar period'.

Eleonora Pistis' prize-winning book, Architecture and Knowledge: Hawksmoor and Oxford, was described as representing a significant contribution to architectural history, as well as a careful reconstruction of hierarchies of knowledge during Hawksmoor's period. Informed by a 'dizzying range of archival and architectural sources' the judges believed that this book will become a standard text for intellectual as well as architectural historians.

Dr Pistis is Associate Professor of of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University. She was trained as both an architect and architectural historian at the University IUAV of Venice, Italy, where she earned her Ph.D. in the History of Architecture and Urban Planning. Before coming to Columbia she was, from 2011 to 2014, the Scott Opler Research Fellow in Architectural History at Worcester College, Oxford, Research Fellow at the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America at Columbia University, and visiting Assistant Professor in Art History at Grinnell College, IA.

If you wish to learn more about the winning book, or indeed any of the titles above, each of the shortlisted authors has been interviewed by Dr Christina Faraday for our podcast British Art Matters. All of these episodes are now live, and can be listened to on our website, or on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

We would like to congratulate Dr Eleonora Pistis, the prize-winning author, and all involved in bringing her book to fruition!