Harvard University professor Ezra F. Vogel has won the Lionel Gelber Prize for his book Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China.
Vogel beat out four other finalists for this year's $15,000 prize, which honours the world's best non-fiction book in English on foreign affairs "that seeks to deepen public debate on significant international issues."
A five-person jury chose the winner, calling it a "deeply informed book by one of the West's most important Asia scholars."
"Ezra Vogel's sympathetic and balanced chronicle of the Long March of Deng Xiaoping as he led China toward a central place on the modern world stage makes impressive use of the author's unparalleled contacts in China's inner circles," jury chair George Russell, executive editor of Fox News, said in a news release.
"It is going to be required reading for many years to come."
The prize was founded in 1989 in memory of Canadian diplomat Lionel Gelber.
Vogel's book (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press) was on a short list that included Nobel Prize winner Henry Kissinger's title On China.
The other finalists were: A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War by Amanda Foreman; Berlin 1961: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Most Dangerous Place on Earth by Frederick Kempe; and George F. Kennan: An American Life by John Lewis Gaddis.
The award is presented annually by The Lionel Gelber Foundation, in partnership with Foreign Policy magazine and the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs.
Vogel is to deliver a free public lecture and receive his award at the school on March 15.