Lukas Prize Project Awards
Announcing the 2011 winners of the Lukas Prizes
The recipients of the 2011 J. Anthony Lukas Prize Project Awards for exceptional nonfiction include authors Eliza Griswold, Isabel Wilkerson and Alex Tizon.
Watch the J. Anthony Lukas Prize Project Awards on CSPAN's BookTV
The awards were presented to the winners and distinguished finalists at an evening ceremony on Tuesday, May 3, at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in New York. The Journalism School and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard co-administer the awards.
The following are the winners and finalists for each prize and the judges’ citations:
J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize ($10,000)
Eliza Griswold for The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
The judges noted: “Griswold examines the conflict between Christianity and Islam along the geographical line where the two beliefs collide. More than half the world’s Muslims live along this line, as do 60 percent of the world’s Christians”. . . a brilliantly original construct for examining one of the most important – perhaps the most important – conflicts in the world today.”
Griswold, a fellow at the New America Foundation, is a journalist and a poet, who frequently writes about conflict, human rights and religion. She was a 2007 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and the recipient of the Robert I. Friedman Award for international investigative reporting. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s Magazine, The Atlantic and the New Republic. Farrar, Straus & Giroux also published a collection of her poetry, Wideawake Field, in 2007.
Three finalists were recognized:
- Jefferson Cowie, Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (New Press)
- Paul Greenberg, Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food (Penguin Press)
- Siddartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer (Scribner)
Judges for the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize were Katherine Bouton, E.J. Dionne, and David Finkel.
Mark Lynton History Prize ($10,000)
Isabel Wilkerson for The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (Random House)
The judges stated: “Wilkerson has created a brilliant and innovative paradox: the intimate epic. At its smallest scale, this towering work rests on a trio of unforgettable biographies, lives as humble as they were heroic… In different decades and for different reasons they headed north and west, along with millions of fellow travelers… In powerful, lyrical prose that combines the historian’s rigor with the novelist’s empathy, Wilkerson’s book changes our understanding of the Great Migration and indeed of the modern United States.”
Wilkerson won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing while she was Chicago bureau chief for The New York Times. Judges cited her profile of a fourth-grader who lived in Chicago’s South Side and for stories on a devastating flood in the Midwest in 1993. Wilkerson also won the 2011 National Book Critics Circle Award for non-fiction. Jurors called The Warmth of Other Sons “a magisterial work.” This is her first book. She previously won the George Polk Award for her newspaper work. She is currently a professor of journalism at Boston University where she is the director of the narrative non-fiction program. She previously taught at Emory University and Princeton University. Wilkerson’s parents were each a part of the Great Migration, the subject of her book, which took them to Washington D.C. where she grew up.
The judges named one finalist, Patrick Wilcken for Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in His Laboratory (Penguin Press).
Judges for the Mark Lynton History Prize were Jane Kamensky, Suzanne Marchand and Matthew Stewart.
J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award ($30,000)
Alex Tizon for Big Little Man: The Asian Male at the Dawn of the Asian Century (to be published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
This award is given to aid the completion of a significant work of nonfiction by helping to close the gap between the time and money the author has and what is required to finish the book.
The judges observed: “Big Little Man will become a book that clearly transcends its deep investigative character in both the complexity of its analysis and the lyricism of its storytelling… The project takes readers on a personal journey of self-discovery that is also a deep exploration of what it has meant to be a man of Asian descent in the Western world from the earliest days of Asian migration.”
Tizon writes of his family's arrival in the United States as Philippine immigrants in 1964… He grew up as an American, but he never believed--due to profound cultural assumptions attending the ‘pathetic inheritance’ of Asian manliness—that he could be an ‘all-American.’ As it stands, "Big Little Man" is an elegantly constructed and deeply personal work of sociological observation that explores the historical, sociological, psychological, and economic underpinnings of a stereotype so deeply embedded in western culture that Asian men believed it themselves. Tizon set out to create a book about "manhood, power, and race," and the judges' reading of "Big Little Man" indicates that Tizon's execution will accomplish this and much more.
Tizon was the recipient (with two colleagues) of the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting while at the Seattle Times. Their stories about widespread corruption and inequities at a federally-sponsored housing project for Native Americans led to reforms. Tizon, who now teaches journalism at the University of Oregon, also was a national correspondent at the Los Angeles Times. He was born in the Philippines and moved to the United States when he was a child.
Two finalists were recognized:
- Joe Mozingo, The Fiddler on Pantico Run (to be published by Simon and Schuster)
- Florence Williams, Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History (to be published by W.W. Norton)
Judges for the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award were Cecilia Balli, Donald Katz and Carlin Romano.
About the J. Anthony Lukas Prize Project Awards
Established in 1998, the prizes recognize excellence in nonfiction that exemplify the literary grace and commitment to serious research and social concern that characterized the work of the awards’ Pulitzer Prize-winning namesake, J. Anthony Lukas, who died in 1997. One of the three Lukas Prize Project Awards, The Mark Lynton History Prize, is named for the late Mark Lynton, a business executive and author of Accidental Journey: A Cambridge Internee’s Memoir of World War II. Lynton was an avid proponent of the writing of history, and the Lynton family has sponsored the Lukas Prize Project since its inception.
The J. Anthony Lukas Prize Project Committee
Arthur Gelb, author, and Linda Healey, editor and Mr. Lukas’ widow, are co-chairs of the J. Anthony Lukas Prize Project Committee. Additional members are Jonathan Alter, author and senior editor, Newsweek; Alan Brinkley, Allan Nevins Professor of History, Columbia University; Ellen Chesler, distinguished lecturer and director of the Eleanor Roosevelt Initiative on Women and Public Life at Roosevelt House, Hunter College; Colin Diver, president, Reed College; Robert Giles, curator, the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University; Phyllis Grann, editor; Vartan Gregorian, president, Carnegie Corporation of New York; Nicholas Lemann, dean and Henry R. Luce Professor, Columbia Journalism School; Marion Lynton, widow of Mark Lynton; Lili Lynton, daughter of the late Mark Lynton and owner of Dinex Corp; Kati Marton, author and human rights activist; Arlene Morgan, associate dean of professional prizes and programs, Columbia Journalism School; and Rosalind Rosenberg, professor of history, Barnard College.