Ilya Kaminsky, Charles King, and Namwali Serpell are the winners of this year’s Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, with Eric Foner taking home a lifetime achievement prize for his decades of writing about 19th-century American history.
The awards, now in their 85th year, are given annually by the Cleveland Foundation to “literature that confronts racism and explores diversity.” The jury for the prizes is chaired by scholar and author Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Stony the Road).
Foner was honored with a lifetime achievement award. The historian, Gates said, “has remade our understanding of the Civil War and especially its aftermath.”
Kaminsky took home the poetry prize for his collection Deaf Republic, which prize juror Rita Dove called “a parable that comes to life and refuses to die.” The book was also a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the PEN/Jean Stein Award.
King was the winner in the nonfiction category for his National Book Critics Circle-nominated Gods of the Upper Air, about five 20th-century anthropologists who challenged long-held racial and gender stereotypes. Juror Steven Pinker praised the book as “gripping and beautifully written.”
The fiction award went to Namwali Serpell for The Old Drift, a novel that traces the history of Zambia through three generations of families. Juror Simon Schama called the novel “brave and extraordinarily well done.”
The winners of the awards are scheduled to be honored at a ceremony in Cleveland on Oct. 1.
Michael Schaub is a Texas-based journalist and regular contributor to NPR.
