World-renowned archaeologist, Professor David Wengrow, has received the prestigious 2025 Wenjin Book Award, for his international best-seller ’The Dawn of Everything’, about the origins of human civilisation.
The annual prize, awarded by the National Library of China, is considered one of the country’s highest literary honours. Titles selected for the award combine in-depth research with writing aimed at the general public.
Professor Wengrow’s book, The Dawn of Everything, which he co-wrote with Professor David Graeber of the London School of Economics, draws on their decades of work in archaeology and anthropology to examine the origins of numerous myths and misconceptions about ancient peoples around the world.
It seeks to dispel a range of mistaken beliefs that human ancestors were either free and equal, or thuggish and warlike, offering a more nuanced and broader understanding of human history, including the origins of farming, property, cities, democracy, slavery and civilisation itself. The book was first published in 2021, but a Chinese translation was only released last year.
Professor Wengrow (UCL Institute of Archaeology) said: "This is a tremendous honour to win such a prestigious award and a great validation of my work with Professor Graeber. It’s always been my goal to challenge unfounded beliefs about the societies our ancestors lived in. I hope that this recognition will help to further encourage people to broaden their understanding about archaeology and anthropology and seriously reconsider where some of the persistent myths about our origins originated."
The Wenjin Book Awards are named after Wenjin Ge, a royal library from the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) located in present-day Hebei province, which helped to found and contributed to the creation of the National Library of China. This year twenty books received the award, including eight social science titles, six popular science titles and eight children’s books. Other titles include histories of Chinese astronomy, and the Chinese atomic bomb, a humorous exploration of brain science and an illustrated children’s book about interesting ancient Chinese buildings.
This year marks the 20th anniversary of the Wenjin Book Awards.
Since its release The Dawn of Everything has appeared in numerous top-ten best selling lists and been was named a Sunday Times , Observer and BBC History Book of the Year in 2021. It was also shortlisted as a finalist for the Orwell Prize for Political Writing in 2022.
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