Nieman Fellows win 2013 Lukas Prize Project Awards

Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Robert Caro and reporter Beth Macy, who both studied at Harvard as Nieman Fellows, have won two of the three 2013 J. Anthony Lukas Prize Project Awards.

Caro will receive the $10,000 Mark Lynton History Prize for his profound understanding of President Lyndon B. Johnson while Macy will be honored with the $30,000 J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award for her book “Factory Man” (Little, Brown and Co.). Another author, Andrew Solomon, has won the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize for “Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity” (Scribner).

Judges cited Caro’s “The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson” (Alfred A. Knopf) for taking “readers to a pivotal moment in modern American history when the presidential ambitions of Lyndon Johnson are first thwarted and then tragically fulfilled. At once deeply researched and utterly absorbing, this book exemplifies the power of narrative history to enlighten and entertain.”

Macy’s “Factory Man” has won the Work-in-Progress Award, which is given to aid the completion of a significant work of nonfiction. The judges cited Macy for “… her extraordinary reporting and narrative skills,” which “come together in a compelling story about a gritty Virginia furniture maker who refuses to allow his family’s company and its workers to become victims of globalization.”

The awards will be presented to winners and finalists on May 7, at a ceremony at Columbia University. Columbia Journalism School and the Nieman Foundation co-administer the awards.