J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize

The J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize is an annual $10,000 award given to a book that exemplifies, "literary grace, a commitment to serious research and social concern."^[1] The prize is given by the Nieman Foundation and by the Columbia University School of Journalism.^[1][2]

Established in 1998, the Lukas Prize Project consists of three awards:^[1]

• The J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize ($10,000)
• The Mark Lynton History Prize ($10,000)
• The J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award ($25,000 plus $5,000 for an annual finalist)

The project is named for Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist and author, J. Anthony Lukas; it has been underwritten since its inception by the family of Mark Lynton, a German Jew who had careers with the British military, Citroen and Hunter Douglas.^[1][3]

Recipients

In the list below, winners are listed first in the gold row, followed by the other nominees. Any finalists are marked with an asterisk.^[4] Note that shortlists were announced only starting in 2016; previously they would just announce winners and any finalists.

  indicates the winner

Award winners and shortlists

Year	Author	Title	Publisher	Result	Ref.
1999	Henry Mayer	All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery		Winner
2000	Witold Rybczynski	A Clearing in the Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the Nineteenth Century		Winner
2001	David Nasaw	The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst		Winner
2002	Diane McWhorter	Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, the Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution		Winner
2003	Samantha Power	"A Problem from Hell": America and the Age of Genocide		Winner
2004	David Maraniss	They Marched into Sunlight: War and Peace, Vietnam and America, October 1967		Winner
2005	Evan Wright	Generation Kill: Devil Dogs, Iceman, Captain America, and the New Face of American War		Winner
2006	Nate Blakeslee	Tulia: Race, Cocaine, and Corruption in a Small Texas Town		Winner	[5]
2007	Lawrence Wright	The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11		Winner	[6]
2008	Jeffrey Toobin	The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court		Winner
2009	Jane Mayer	The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals	Doubleday	Winner	[7]
2010	David Finkel	The Good Soldiers		Winner
2011	Eliza Griswold	The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam	Farrar, Straus & Giroux	Winner	[8]
	Jefferson Cowie	Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class	New Press	Finalist	[8]
	Paul Greenberg	Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food	Penguin Press	Finalist	[8]
	Siddhartha Mukherjee	The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer	Scribner	Finalist	[8]
2012	Daniel J. Sharfstein	The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White	Viking Press	Winner	[9]
	Manning Marable	Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention	Viking Press	Finalist	[9]
2013	Andrew Solomon	Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity	Scribner	Winner	[10]
	Cynthia Carr	Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz	Bloomsbury	Finalist	[10]
2014	Sheri Fink	Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital	Crown Publishers	Winner	[11]
	Jonathan M. Katz	The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster	Palgrave Macmillan	Finalist	[11]
2015	Jenny Nordberg	The Underground Girls of Kabul: In Search of a Hidden Resistance in Afghanistan	Crown Publishers	Winner	[12]
	Joshua Davis	Spare Parts: Four Undocumented Teenagers, One Ugly Robot, and the Battle for the American Dream	Farrar, Straus and Giroux	Shortlist	[12]
2016	Susan Southard	Nagasaki: Life After Nuclear War	Viking Penguin	Winner	[13]
	Dale Russakoff	The Prize: Who's in Charge of America's Schools?	Houghton Mifflin Harcourt	Finalist	[13]
	Adam Briggle	A Field Philosopher's Guide to Fracking: How One Texas Town Stood Up to Big Oil and Gas	Liveright	Shortlist	[14]
	Kathryn J. Edin and H. Luke Shaefer	$2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America	Houghton Mifflin Harcourt	Shortlist	[14]
	Stephen Witt	How Music Got Free: The End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy	Viking Penguin	Shortlist	[14]
2017	Gary Younge	Another Day in the Death of America: A Chronicle of Ten Short Lives	Nation Books	Winner	[15][16]
	Zachary Roth	The Great Suppression: Voting Rights, Corporate Cash, and the Conservative Assault on Democracy	Crown	Finalist	[15][16]
	Arlie Russell Hochschild	Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning On the American Right	The New Press	Shortlist	[17]
	Nancy Isenberg	White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America	Viking	Shortlist	[17]
	Jane Mayer	Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right	Doubleday	Shortlist	[17]
2018	Amy Goldstein	Janesville: An American Story	Simon & Schuster	Winner	[18]
	Jessica Bruder	Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century	W.W. Norton & Company	Finalist	[18]
	Nate Blakeslee	American Wolf: A True Story of Survival and Obsession in the West	Crown	Shortlist	[19]
	Lauren Markham	The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants And the Making of an American Life	Crown	Shortlist	[19]
	Helen Thorpe	The Newcomers: Finding Refuge, Friendship, and Hope in an American Classroom	Scribner	Shortlist	[19]
2019	Shane Bauer	American Prison: A Reporter's Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment	Penguin Press	Winner	[20]
	Lauren Hilgers	Patriot Number One: American Dreams in Chinatown	Crown	Finalist	[20]
	Howard Blum	In the Enemy's House: The Secret Saga of the FBI Agent and the Code Breaker Who Caught the Russian Spies	HarperCollins	Shortlist	[21]
	Chris McGreal	American Overdose: The Opioid Tragedy in Three Acts	PublicAffairs	Shortlist	[21]
	Sarah Smarsh	Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth	Scribner	Shortlist	[21]
2020	Alex Kotlowitz	An American Summer: Love and Death in Chicago	Nan A. Talese/Doubleday	Winner	[22][23]
	Emily Bazelon	Charged: The Movement to Transform American Prosecution and End Mass Incarceration	Random House	Finalist	[22][23]
	Jennifer Berry Hawes	Grace Will Lead Us Home: The Charleston Church Massacre and the Hard, Inspiring Journey to Forgiveness	St. Martin's Press	Shortlist	[24][25]
	Jodie Adams Kirshner	Broke: Hardship and Resilience in a City of Broken Promises	St. Martin's Press	Shortlist	[24][25]
	Margaret O'Mara	The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America	Penguin Press	Shortlist	[24][25]
2021	Jessica Goudeau	After the Last Border: Two Families and the Story of Refuge in America	Viking	Winner	[26][27]
	Barton Gellman	Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the American Surveillance State	Penguin Press	Finalist	[26][27]
	Becky Cooper	We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and a Half Century of Silence	Grand Central Publishing	Shortlist	[28][29]
	Seyward Darby	Sisters in Hate: American Women on the Front Lines of White Nationalism	Little, Brown and Company	Shortlist	[28][29]
	Isabel Wilkerson	Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents	Random House	Shortlist	[28][29]
2022	Andrea Elliott	Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City	Random House	Winner	[30][31]
	Patrick Radden Keefe	Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty	Doubleday	Finalist	[30][31]
	Scott Ellsworth	The Ground Breaking: An American City and Its Search for Justice	Dutton	Shortlist	[32][33]
	Jessica Nordell	The End of Bias: A Beginning: The Science and Practice of Overcoming Unconscious Bias	Metropolitan	Shortlist	[32][33]
	Joshua Prager	The Family Roe: An American Story	Norton/Liverigh	Shortlist	[32][33]
2023	Linda Villarosa	Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and on the Health of Our Nation	Doubleday	Winner	[34]
	Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa	His Name Is George Floyd: One Man’s Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice	Viking	Finalist	[34]
	Rachel Aviv	Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us	Farrar, Straus and Giroux	Shortlist	[35]
	Lyndsie Bourgon	Tree Thieves: Crime and Survival in North America’s Woods	Little, Brown Spark	Shortlist	[35]
	Jack Lowery	It Was Vulgar & It Was Beautiful: How AIDS Activists Used Art to Fight a Pandemic	Bold Type Books	Shortlist	[35]
2024	Dashka Slater	Accountable: The True Story of a Racist Social Media Account and the Teenagers Whose Lives It Changed	Farrar, Straus and Giroux	Winner	[36]
	Kerry Howley	Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs: A Journey Through the Deep State	Knopf	Finalist	[36]
	Cara McGoogan	Blood Farm: The Explosive Big Pharma Scandal that Altered the AIDS Crisis		Shortlist	[37]
	Cameron McWhirter and Zusha Elinson	American Gun: The True Story of the AR-15		Shortlist	[37]
	Joe Sexton	The Lost Sons of Omaha: Two Young Men in an American Tragedy		Shortlist	[37]
2025	Rebecca Nagle	By the Fire We Carry: The Generations-Long Fight for Justice on Native Land	Harper	Winner	[38]
	Pamela Prickett and Stefan Timmermans	The Unclaimed: Abandonment and Hope in the City of Angels	Crown	Finalist	[39]
	Richard Beck	Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life	Crown	Shortlist	[39]
	Barbara Bradley Hagerty	Bringing Ben Home: A Murder, a Conviction, and the Fight to Redeem American Justice	Penguin Random House	Shortlist	[39]
	Mara Kardas-Nelson	We Are Not Able to Live in the Sky: The Seductive Promise of Microfinance	Metropolitan	Shortlist	[39]

See also

• Mark Lynton History Prize
• J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award