The National Book Awards (NBA) are a set of annual U.S. literary awards. At the final National Book Awards Ceremony every November, the National Book Foundation presents the National Book Awards and two lifetime achievement awards to authors. The National Book Awards were established in 1936 by the American Booksellers Association, abandoned during World War II, and re-established by three book industry organizations in 1950. Non-U.S. authors and publishers were eligible for the pre-war awards. Since then they are presented to U.S. authors for books published in the United States roughly during the award year.
The Bancroft Prize is awarded each year by the trustees of Columbia University for books about diplomacy or the history of the Americas.
John W. Dower is an American author and historian. His 1999 book Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II won the U.S. National Book Award for Nonfiction, the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, the Bancroft Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Mark Lynton History Prize, and the John K. Fairbank Prize of the American Historical Association.
The Ridenhour Prizes are awards in four categories given annually in recognition of those "who persevere in acts of truth-telling that protect the public interest, promote social justice or illuminate a more just vision of society".
Michael Dobbs is a British-American non-fiction author and journalist.
Tiya Alicia Miles is an American historian. She is Michael Garvey Professor of History at Harvard University and Radcliffe Alumnae Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She is a public historian, academic historian, and creative writer whose work explores the intersections of African American, Native American and women's histories. Her research includes African American and Native American interrelated and comparative histories ; Black, Native, and U.S. women's histories; and African American and Native American women's literature. She was a 2011 MacArthur Fellow.
Anand Gopal is a contributing writer at The New Yorker and author of No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban and the War through Afghan Eyes, which describes the travails of three Afghans caught in the war on terror. It was a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction and the 2014 National Book Award for non-fiction. He has won many major journalism prizes, including the National Magazine Award, for his magazine writing on conflict in the Middle East.
The Cundill History Prize is an annual Canadian book prize for "the best history writing in English". It was established in 2008 by Peter Cundill and is administered by McGill University. The prize encourages "informed public debate through the wider dissemination of history writing to new audiences around the world" and is awarded to an author whose book, published in the past year, demonstrates "historical scholarship, originality, literary quality and broad appeal". No restrictions are set on the topic of the book or the nationality of the author, and English translations are permitted.
Claudio Saunt is a professor, author, and historian of early America, the U.S. South, and Native American studies. Saunt is the prize-winning author of Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory (2020), West of the Revolution: An Uncommon History of 1776 (2014), Black, White, and Indian: Race and the Unmaking of an American Family (2005), A New Order of Things: Property, Power, and the Transformation of the Creek Indians, 1733–1816 (1999). Saunt received his Ph.D. in Early America from Duke University in 1996 and presently works as a Richard B. Russell Professor in American History at the University of Georgia, Athens. Saunt is also Co-Director of the Center for Virtual History and Associate Director of the Institute of Native American Studies. He was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 2022.
Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy is a nonfiction book about the Attica Prison uprising of 1971 and details not only the events of the week-long uprising and its brutal ending, but also the protracted legal battles that persisted for decades after the event. It is the third book by University of Michigan historian Heather Ann Thompson. Blood in the Water provides a complete history of the incidents at Attica reflecting a decade of research, including information from interviews, government records, personal correspondence, and legal documents, much of which has never been made public before. Thompson argues that the Attica uprising and New York state's response represented shifting American approaches to incarceration and policy. The reverberations of this watershed event has continued to influence America's prison system.
Heather Ann Thompson is an American historian, author, activist, professor, and speaker from Detroit, Michigan. Thompson won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for History, the 2016 Bancroft Prize, and five other awards for her work Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy. This book was also a finalist for the Cundill Prize in History as well as the National Book Award and the LA Times Book Award. She is the recipient of several social justice awards as well, including the Life-Long Dedication to Social Justice Award. Alliance of Families for Justice and the Regents Distinguished Award for Public Service.She was awarded the Pitt Professorship of American History and Diplomacy in 2019-2020 and received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2022. Thompson was also named a distinguished lecturer by the Organization of American Historians.
Jill Leovy is an American journalist and nonfiction writer. She is best known for the non-fiction book Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America, her 2015 New York Times best-seller about homicide in Los Angeles. Leovy argues in Ghettoside that more effort must be given to arresting and incarcerating perpetrators of inner-city murders, because "impunity for the murder of black men remained America’s great, though mostly invisible, race problem."
Jennifer Szalai is the nonfiction book critic at The New York Times. Szalai was born in Canada and attended the University of Toronto, where she studied political science and peace and conflict. She holds a master's degree in international relations from the London School of Economics.
Grace Talusan is a Filipino American writer. Her 2019 memoir, The Body Papers, won the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing and the Massachusetts Book Award in nonfiction and was a New York Times Editors' Choice selection. Her short story, "The Book of Life and Death," was the Boston Book Festival's One City One Story selection in 2020.
Andy Horowitz is an American historian and author. In 2021, he won a Bancroft Prize for his book Katrina: A History, 1915-2015 about the flooding caused by Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, Louisiana and the aftermath of the disaster.
Rebecca Donner is a Canadian-born writer. She is the author of All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days, which won the 2022 National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award, and The Chautauqua Prize She was a 2023 Visiting Scholar at Oxford, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in recognition of her contribution to historical scholarship. She is currently a 2023-2024 Fellow at Harvard.
Marie Favereau Doumenjou is a French historian and writer. She currently teaches medieval history at Paris Nanterre University, and specialises in the history of the Mongol Empire and Islamic history. She has published several books. Her 2021 book, The Horde: How the Mongols Changed the World, was published to critical acclaim, being nominated for the Cundill Prize, the Prose Award in World History by the Association of American Publishers, and listed as a notable book of the year by several publications.
Jerald Walker is an American writer and professor of creative writing and African American literature at Emerson College.
The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care is a 2019 non-fiction book by the American author, poet, and essayist, Anne Boyer. The memoir chronicles Boyer's experience as a breast cancer patient. Boyer takes an untraditional approach to the standard illness narrative, by weaving together her personal journey as a patient in treatment with reflections on art and literature, and critiques of capitalism and the medical industry.
All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, A Black Family Keepsake is a 2021 non-fiction book by historian Tiya Miles that discusses American slavery in the 19th century, specifically focusing on Ashley's sack to guide the narrative.
