The National Book Awards 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 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction is one of the seven American Pulitzer Prizes that are awarded annually for the "Letters, Drama, and Music" category. The award is given to a nonfiction book written by an American author and published during the preceding calendar year that is ineligible for any other Pulitzer Prize. The Prize has been awarded since 1962; beginning in 1980, one to three finalists have been announced alongside the winner.
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.
David Hackett Fischer is University Professor of History Emeritus at Brandeis University. Fischer's major works have covered topics ranging from large macroeconomic and cultural trends to narrative histories of significant events to explorations of historiography.
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.
Vincent Brown is Charles Warren Professor of History, Professor of African and African-American Studies, and Director of the History Design Studio at Harvard University. His research, writing, teaching, and other creative endeavors are focused on the political dimensions of cultural practice in the African Diaspora, with a particular emphasis on the early modern Atlantic world.
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 writer for The New Yorker magazine 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 was founded in 2008 by Peter Cundill to recognize and promote literary and academic achievement in history. The prize is presented annually to an author who has published a non-fiction book in the prior year that is likely to have profound literary, social, and academic impact in the area of history. At a value of US$75,000, the Grand Prize is claimed to be the richest non-fiction historical literature prize in the world. In addition, two "Recognition of Excellence" prizes of US$10,000 each are awarded. The winners of the prizes are selected by an independent jury of at least five internationally qualified individuals selected by McGill University. The Cundill Prize in History at McGill is administered by McGill University's Dean of Arts, with the help of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada (MISC).
The National Book Award for Nonfiction is one of five U.S. annual National Book Awards, which are given by the National Book Foundation to recognize outstanding literary work by U.S. citizens. They are awards "by writers to writers". The panelists are five "writers who are known to be doing great work in their genre or field".
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 non-fiction 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 other awards for her work Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy.
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."
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 a 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 for Biography, and The Chautauqua Prize She is currently a 2023 Visiting Scholar at Oxford, and will be 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.
