David Van Reybrouck awarded the Geschwister Scholl Prize

Published by Bodley Head UK and Norton US in spring 2024

Translated by David Colmer & David McKay

“An astounding feat of both research and storytelling. History at its best.” Yuval Noah Harari

“Seamlessly interwoven with hundreds upon hundreds of personal testimonies, Van Reybrouck’s narrative is a masterly display of the historian’s craft and a welcome corrective to the fiction that the Dutch in the East Indies were a benign force.” J M Coetzee

“A rare blend of formal daring, intellectual resourcefulness and journalistic fluency.” Pankaj Mishra

“History as it should be. Carried by a democracy of ordinary voices, meticulous research, an eye for decisive detail, vivid language and drama, Van Reybrouck forges a fantastic visionary compass to where history was heading at the time: the imagining of a new world order by people of colour.” Antjie Krog

David van Reybrouck has been awarded the 2023 Geschwister Scholl Prize for his landmark book Revolusi: Indonesia and the Birth of the Modern World.

The prestigious Geschwister Scholl Prize is a German prize named after Hans and Sophie Scholl who were members of the White Rose, the Munich student group that resisted the Nazis. The prize is awarded annually to honour a recent book that bears witness to intellectual independence, and promotes civic freedom, and moral, intellectual and aesthetic courage. The judges said that Revolusi “presents Indonesia's liberation from colonial rule as a gripping global history that is highly topical”.

The prize-giving ceremony will take place in Munich on 28 November.