Nieman Foundation Announces Winners of Lukas Prize for Nonfiction

Two books and a work-in-progress have been named winners of the J. Anthony Lukas Prize Project, an awards program jointly administered by the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University and the Nieman Foundation at Harvard to recognize superb works of nonfiction.

The awards will be presented on Saturday, May 6, at the Harvard Faculty Club.

The $10,000 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize will be awarded to Witold Rybczynski for A Clearing in the Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the Nineteenth Century (Scribner). The $10,000 Mark Lynton History Prize will be awarded to John W. Dower for Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (W.W. Norton & Company/The New Press). The $45,000 J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award will go to James Tobin for Work of the Wind: A Remarkable Family, an Overlooked Genius, and the Race for Flight (Free Press).

The J. Anthony Lukas Prizes are named for a winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, one as a newspaper reporter and the other as a book author. His first Pulitizer, in 1968, was for “The Two Worlds of Linda Fitzpatrick,” an article in The New York Times on the life and, eventually, death of a wealthy Connecticut teenager involved in drugs and the hippie movement. The second Pulitzer, in 1986, was for his book, Common Ground, about Boston school desegregation. Lukas began his newspaper career at the Harvard Crimson. After he won his first Pulitzer he returned to Harvard as a Nieman Fellow, class of 1969.

Mark Lynton, for whom the history prize is named, was a World War II major in the British Army. Shortly before his death in 1995 he wrote Accidental Journey, a memoir of his war experience.