Columbia Journalism School and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University announced the winners of the 2024 J. Anthony Lukas Prizes, with Ned Blackhawk, Dashka Slater, Lorraine Boissoneault, and Alice Driver taking home the awards for outstanding nonfiction books.
Blackhawk won the Mark Lynton History Prize for The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History, which focuses on the story of the United States as told through Native American experience. The book was the winner of the 2023 National Book Award for nonfiction. Gary J. Bass was named a finalist for Judgment at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia.
The J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize went to Slater for Accountable: The True Story of a Racist Social Media Account and the Teenagers Whose Lives It Changed, about the fallout from an Instagram scandal that engulfed a California town. Honored as a finalist was Kerry Howley for Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs: A Journey Through the Deep State.
Winning the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Awards were Boissoneault for Body Weather: Notes on Illness in the Anthropocene and Driver for The Life and Death of the American Worker: The Immigrants Taking on America’s Largest Meatpacking Company.
The Lukas Awards were established in 1998. Previous winners include Jeffrey Toobin for The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court, Andrew Solomon for Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity, and Kerri K. Greenidge for Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
