The J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize is an annual $10,000 award given to a book that exemplifies, "literary grace, a commitment to serious research and social concern." [1] The prize is given by the Nieman Foundation and by the Columbia University School of Journalism. [1] [2]
Established in 1998, the Lukas Prize Project consists of three awards: [1]
The project is named for Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist and author, J. Anthony Lukas; it has been underwritten since its inception by the family of Mark Lynton, a German Jew who had careers with the British military, Citroen and Hunter Douglas. [1] [3]
In the list below, winners are listed first in the gold row, followed by the other nominees. Any finalists are marked with an asterisk. [4] Note that shortlists were announced only starting in 2016; previously they would just announce winners and any finalists.
Year | Author | Title | Publisher |
---|---|---|---|
1999 | Henry Mayer | All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery | |
2000 | Witold Rybczynski | A Clearing in the Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the Nineteenth Century | |
2001 | David Nasaw | The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst | |
2002 | Diane McWhorter | Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, the Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution | |
2003 | Samantha Power | "A Problem from Hell": America and the Age of Genocide | |
2004 | David Maraniss | They Marched into Sunlight: War and Peace, Vietnam and America, October 1967 | |
2005 | Evan Wright | Generation Kill: Devil Dogs, Iceman, Captain America, and the New Face of American War | |
2006 | Nate Blakeslee | Tulia: Race, Cocaine, and Corruption in a Small Texas Town | |
2007 | Lawrence Wright | The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 | |
2008 | Jeffrey Toobin | The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court | |
2009 | Jane Mayer | The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals | |
2010 | David Finkel | The Good Soldiers | |
2011 [5] | Eliza Griswold | The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam | Farrar, Straus & Giroux |
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 | |
Siddhartha Mukherjee* | The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer | Scribner | |
2012 [6] | Daniel J. Sharfstein | The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White | Viking Press |
Manning Marable* | Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention | Viking Press | |
2013 [7] | Andrew Solomon | Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity | Scribner |
Cynthia Carr* | Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz | Bloomsbury | |
2014 [8] | Sheri Fink | Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital | Crown Publishers |
Jonathan M. Katz* | The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster | Palgrave Macmillan | |
2015 [9] | Jenny Nordberg | The Underground Girls of Kabul: In Search of a Hidden Resistance in Afghanistan | Crown Publishers |
Joshua Davis* | Spare Parts: Four Undocumented Teenagers, One Ugly Robot, and the Battle for the American Dream | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | |
2016 [10] [11] | Susan Southard | Nagasaki: Life After Nuclear War | Viking Penguin |
Adam Briggle | A Field Philosopher's Guide to Fracking: How One Texas Town Stood Up to Big Oil and Gas | Liveright | |
Kathryn J. Edin & H. Luke Shaefer | $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America | Houghton Mifflin Harcourt | |
Dale Russakoff* | The Prize: Who's in Charge of America's Schools? | Houghton Mifflin Harcourt | |
Stephen Witt | How Music Got Free: The End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy | Viking Penguin | |
2017 [12] [13] | Gary Younge | Another Day in the Death of America: A Chronicle of Ten Short Lives | Nation Books |
Arlie Russell Hochschild | Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning On the American Right | The New Press | |
Nancy Isenberg | White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America | Viking | |
Jane Mayer | Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right | Doubleday | |
Zachary Roth* | The Great Suppression: Voting Rights, Corporate Cash, and the Conservative Assault on Democracy | Crown | |
2018 [14] [15] | Amy Goldstein | Janesville: An American Story | Simon & Schuster |
Nate Blakeslee | American Wolf: A True Story of Survival and Obsession in the West | Crown | |
Jessica Bruder* | Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century | W.W. Norton & Company | |
Lauren Markham | The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants And the Making of an American Life | Crown | |
Helen Thorpe | The Newcomers: Finding Refuge, Friendship, and Hope in an American Classroom | Scribner | |
2019 [16] [17] | Shane Bauer | American Prison: A Reporter's Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment | Penguin Press |
Howard Blum | In the Enemy's House: The Secret Saga of the FBI Agent and the Code Breaker Who Caught the Russian Spies | HarperCollins | |
Lauren Hilgers* | Patriot Number One: American Dreams in Chinatown | Crown | |
Chris McGreal | American Overdose: The Opioid Tragedy in Three Acts | PublicAffairs | |
Sarah Smarsh | Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth | Scribner | |
2020 [18] [19] | Alex Kotlowitz | An American Summer: Love and Death in Chicago | Nan A. Talese/Doubleday |
Emily Bazelon* | Charged: The Movement to Transform American Prosecution and End Mass Incarceration | Random House | |
Jennifer Berry Hawes | Grace Will Lead Us Home: The Charleston Church Massacre and the Hard, Inspiring Journey to Forgiveness | St. Martin's Press | |
Jodie Adams Kirshner | Broke: Hardship and Resilience in a City of Broken Promises | St. Martin's Press | |
Margaret O'Mara | The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America | Penguin Press | |
2021 [20] [21] | Jessica Goudeau | After the Last Border: Two Families and the Story of Refuge in America | Viking |
Becky Cooper | We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and a Half Century of Silence | Grand Central Publishing | |
Seyward Darby | Sisters in Hate: American Women on the Front Lines of White Nationalism | Little, Brown and Company | |
Barton Gellman* | Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the American Surveillance State | Penguin Press | |
Isabel Wilkerson | Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents | Random House | |
2022 [22] | Andrea Elliott | Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City | |
Patrick Radden Keefe | Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty |
Jay Anthony Lukas was an American journalist and author, best known for his 1985 book Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families. Common Ground is a classic study of race relations, class conflict, and school busing in Boston, Massachusetts, as seen through the eyes of three families: one upper-middle-class white, one working-class white, and one working-class African-American. He has won two Pulitzer Prizes.
The Nieman Foundation for Journalism is the primary journalism institution at Harvard University.
Joshua Davis is an American writer, film producer and co-founder of Epic Magazine.
Eliza Griswold is a Pulitzer Prize–winning American journalist and poet. Griswold is currently a contributing writer to The New Yorker and a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University. She is the author of Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America, a 2018 New York Times Notable Book and a Times Critics’ Pick, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction and the Ridenhour Book Prize in 2019. Griswold was a fellow at the New America Foundation from 2008 to 2010 and won a 2010 Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She is a former Nieman Fellow and a current Berggruen Fellow at Harvard Divinity School, and has been published in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, and the New York Times Magazine.
Tomas Alexander Asuncion Tizon was a Filipino-American author and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. His book Big Little Man, a memoir and cultural history, explores themes related to race, masculinity, and personal identity. Tizon taught at the University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication. His final story, titled "My Family's Slave", was published as the cover story of the June 2017 issue of The Atlantic after his death, sparking significant debate.
The Mark Lynton History Prize is an annual $10,000 award given to a book "of history, on any subject, that best combines intellectual or scholarly distinction with felicity of expression". The prize is one of three awards given as part of the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize administered by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism and by the Columbia University School of Journalism.
Tony Bartelme, an American journalist and author, is the senior projects reporter for The Post and Courier in Charleston, South Carolina. He has been a finalist for four Pulitzer Prizes.
Suzannah Terry Lessard is an American writer of literary non-fiction. She has written memoir, reportorial pieces, essays, and opinion.
The Mirror Awards are annual journalism awards recognizing the work of writers, reporters, editors and organizations who cover the media industry. The awards were established by the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications in 2006.
Jonathan Myerson Katz is an American journalist and author known for his reporting on the 2010 Haiti earthquake and the role of the United Nations in the ensuing cholera outbreak.
Nancy G. Isenberg is an American historian, and T. Harry Williams Professor of history at Louisiana State University.
Edward Alden is an American journalist, author, and the Bernard L. Schwartz senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Alden specializes in U.S. economic competitiveness, U.S. trade policy, and visa and immigration policy. Alden is the author of The Closing of the American Border: Terrorism, Immigration, and Security Since 9/11, a finalist for the Lukas Book Prize, and Failure to Adjust: How Americans Got Left Behind in the Global Economy.
Coda Media is a nonprofit news organization that produces journalism about the roots of major global crises. It was founded in 2016 by Natalia Antelava, a former BBC correspondent, and Ilan Greenberg, a magazine and newspaper writer who served as a staff reporter for The Wall Street Journal.
Jessica Bruder is an American journalist who writes about subcultures and teaches narrative writing at Columbia Journalism School.
The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke is a 2018 biography of Alain LeRoy Locke written by historian Jeffrey C. Stewart. The biography examines the life of Locke, an African-American activist and scholar who mentored many African-American intellectuals and writers and whom many see as the "father" of the Harlem Renaissance. Published by Oxford University Press, The New Negro won the 2018 National Book Award for Nonfiction and the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Biography.
Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom is a 2018 biography of African American abolitionist, writer, and orator Frederick Douglass, written by historian David W. Blight and published by Simon & Schuster. It won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for History.
Janesville: An American Story is a non-fiction book written by Amy Goldstein and published by Simon & Schuster in 2017. It covers the city of Janesville, Wisconsin, and follows the stories of several of its working-class inhabitants from 2008 to 2013, tracing what happens after the Janesville Assembly Plant shuts down.
Kerri K. Greenidge is an American historian and academic. Her book Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter, a biography of civil rights activist William Monroe Trotter, won the 2020 Mark Lynton History Prize. Her sisters are the playwright Kirsten Greenidge and the novelist Kaitlyn Greenidge.
Christopher Leonard is an American investigative journalist. He has written three books, The Meat Racket: The Secret Takeover of America's Food Business, the New York Times best-selling Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America, and The Lords of Easy Money: How the Federal Reserve Broke the American Economy. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, and Bloomberg Businessweek.
The J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award, established in 1999, is a literary award "given annually to aid in the completion of a significant work of nonfiction on a topic of American political or social concern." The prize is given by the Nieman Foundation and by the Columbia University School of Journalism and is intended to "assist in closing the gap between the time and money an author has and the time and money that finishing a book requires.