Awards & Conferences

Winners and finalists have been selected for the 2023 Lukas Prize Project Awards, presented jointly by Columbia Journalism School and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard.

Linda Villarosa is winner of the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize for “Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and on the Health of Our Nation.” Winner of the Mark Lynton History Prize is Deborah Cohen for “Last Call at the Hotel Imperial: The Reporters Who Took on a World at War.” The two J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award winners are Jesselyn Cook for “The Quiet Damage: QAnon and the Destruction of the American Family” and Mike Hixenbaugh for “Uncivil: One Town’s Fight over Race and Identity, and the New Battle for America’s Schools.” Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa are Lukas Book Prize finalists for their book “His Name Is George Floyd: One Man’s Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice” and Kelly Lytle Hernández is the Lynton History Prize finalist for “Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire & Revolution in the Borderlands.”

• Read the press release.

Established in 1998, the Lukas Prize Project honors the best in American nonfiction writing.

Co-administered by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and the Nieman Foundation, the project is sponsored by the family of the late Mark Lynton, a historian and senior executive at the firm Hunter Douglas in the Netherlands.

Awards are given annually in three categories:

• The J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize ($10,000) recognizes superb examples of nonfiction on an American topic that exemplifies the literary grace, commitment to serious research and social concern that characterized the work of the award’s namesake.
• The Mark Lynton History Prize ($10,000) is awarded to the book-length work of history on any subject that best combines intellectual or scholarly distinction with felicity of expression.
• The J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award (two $25,000 prizes) is given annually to aid in the completion of a significant work of nonfiction on a topic of American political or social concern.

Submissions for the 2023 Lukas Prizes are now being accepted. The deadline to enter is Thursday, Dec. 8, 2022. Entry guidelines and forms are available on the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism website.

The winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award, J. Anthony Lukas published five epic books, each of which examined a critical fault line in America’s social and political landscape by examining individual lives caught up in the havoc of change.

A former foreign and national correspondent for The New York Times, Lukas tackled the country’s generational conflict in his first book “Don’t Shoot: We Are Your Children,” examined the impact of Boston school desegregation in “Common Ground,” and told a sweeping tale of class conflict at the turn of the century in “Big Trouble,” completed just before his death in 1997.

His other books were “The Barnyard Epithet and Other Obscenities: Notes on the Chicago Conspiracy Trial” and “Nightmare: The Underside of the Nixon Years.”

Lukas began his newspaper career as a student at The Harvard Crimson and later returned to the Harvard campus as a Nieman Fellow in the class of 1969.

As he explains in his 1995 autobiography, “Accidental Journey: A Cambridge Internee’s Memoir of World War II,” Mark Lynton was born Max-Otto Ludwig Loewenstein in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1920. Lynton moved to Berlin two years later when his father was named head of a major German car manufacturer. Raised by a Swiss nanny, Lynton was bilingual in French and German and was educated in Germany, France and England.

A student at Cambridge University when WWII began, Lynton was interned at a Canadian detention camp before his return to England and, ultimately, enlistment in the British military, where he served for seven years. Assigned to the Pioneer Corps, Lynton later transferred to the Royal Tank Regiment, attaining the rank of captain. He completed his career with British Intelligence, interrogating German officers.

Lynton had a long career working for Citroen and was a senior executive at the firm Hunter Douglas in the Netherlands at the time of his death in 1997. His wife, Marion Lynton, and children, Lili and Michael, established the Mark Lynton History Prize as part of the Lukas Prize Project to honor Lynton, who was an avid reader of history. The Lynton family has generously underwritten the Lukas Prize Project since its inception in 1998.