The Unwin Award Lecture

Please join us on Tuesday 20th February 2024 at 6pm for the inaugural Publishers Association convened Unwin Award Lecture.

The Publishers Association was hugely grateful to receive funds from the Unwin Charitable Trust last year to support a multi-year programme of work in championing the value of publishing to the world. A key element of that work will be the establishment of the Unwin Award Lecture, an annual event to celebrate authors who have made a fundamental contribution to the world. This is the inaugural year and we hope to commit to hosting this event as part of a series over a number of years, championing a whole range of voices and bringing together influential partners in the overall success of the publishing industry.  

This year, our first lecture will be Peter Frankopan, Oxford professor of global history and author of the huge bestsellers The Silk Roads and The Earth Transformed. The lecture will be followed by a drinks reception.

Professor Peter Frankopan is Professor of Global History at Oxford University and Senior Research Fellow at Worcester College, Oxford. The Silk Roads: A New History of the World, published by Bloomsbury in 2015, was a No. 1 Sunday Times bestseller and remained in the top 10 for nine months after publication. It was named one of the ‘Books of the Decade’ 2010-2020 by the Sunday Times. The New Silk Roads: The Present and Future of the World was published by Bloomsbury in 2018 and won the Human Sciences prize of the Carical Foundation in 2019. The Earth Transformed was a Sunday Times bestseller and named The Times History Book of the Year 2023, and a Financial Times, Independent, Guardian/Observer, Sunday Times/Times, New Yorker, Frontline (The Hindu) and New Zealand Herald Book of the Year.