Berger Prize 2025 Longlist announcement

The longlist for the 2025 Berger Prize was announced at the Walpole Society Summer Party on 9 July 2025, held at the Warburg Institute.

The chair of the judging panel, Dr Jonny Yarker, noted that this year's prize received its highest ever number of submissions, from a wide range of publishers.

The eighteen longlisted titles are as follows:

Fay Blanchard and Anthony Spira (editors)

Vanessa Bell: A World of Form and Colour

Philip Wilson Publishers

Rosie Broadley (editor)

Francis Bacon: Human Presence

National Portrait Gallery

Bruce Boucher

John Soane’s Cabinet of Curiosities: Reflections on an Architect and his Collection

Yale University Press

Esther Chadwick

The Radical Print: Art and Politics in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain

Paul Mellon Centre

Bryony Coombs

Visual Arts and the Auld Alliance: Scotland, France and National Identity c.1420-1550

Edinburgh University Press

Paul Gough

Gilbert Spencer: The Life and Work of a Very English Artist

Yale University Press

Bendor Grosvenor

The Invention of British Art

Elliott & Thompson

Elain Harwood and Alan Powers (editors)

Ernö Goldfinger

Liverpool University Press

Mark Laird

The Dominion of Flowers: Botanical Art & Global Plant Relations

Paul Mellon Centre​

Cristina S. Martinez and Cynthia E. Roman

Female Printmakers, Printsellers and Publishers in the Eighteenth Century: The Imprint of Women 1735-1830

Cambridge University Press

Nicholas Olsberg

The Master Builder: William Butterfield and His Times

Lund Humphries

Madeleine Pelling

Writing on the Wall: Graffiti and Rebellion in Eighteenth-Century Britain

Profile Books

Eleonora Pistis

Architecture of Knowledge: Hawksmoor and Oxford

Brepols

Dorothy Price, Esther Chadwick, Cora Gilroy-Ware and Sarah Lea

Entangled Pasts, 1768-now: Art, Colonialism and Change

Royal Academy of Arts

Natalie Prizel,

Victorian Ethical Optics: Innocent Eyes and Aberrant Bodies

Oxford University Press

Jeff Rosen

Julia Margaret Cameron: The Colonial Shadows of Victorian Photography

Paul Mellon Centre

Fiona Smyth,

Pistols in St Paul’s: Science, music, and architecture in the twentieth century

Manchester University Press

Gavin Stamp

Interwar British Architecture 1919-39

Profile Books