Pulitzer-Prize-Winning Historian Caroline Elkins Honored with 2024 NYU/Axinn Foundation Prize
Harvard University Professor Caroline Elkins, author of Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire and the Pulitzer-Prize-winning Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya, has been named the recipient of the 2024 NYU/Axinn Foundation Prize. The honor aims to celebrate and support distinguished work in artistic literary narrative nonfiction by a writer whose career is in full vibrancy.
The NYU/Axinn Foundation Prize, given every other year, honors an American writer of artistic literary narrative nonfiction whose published book or books are of exceptional quality and societal import and who is expected to produce additional highly significant work in subsequent years. The winner is selected by an independent panel of judges considering nominations from distinguished people drawn from many areas of American literary life, including from prominent scholars, writers, librarians, and independent booksellers whose identity is not known to the judges.
The prize includes a cash award of $100,000. The purpose of the award is to encourage the ongoing work of a writer of literary narrative nonfiction whose books invite a wide readership to explore issues and subjects not otherwise adequately addressed, and thereby make a significant impact on the wider culture.
“The NYU/Axinn Foundation Prize not only recognizes writers’ past achievements, but also supports their ongoing contributions to literary narrative nonfiction,” says Lynne Kiorpes, dean of NYU’s Graduate School of Arts and Science (GSAS), which administers the award. “By encouraging future endeavors, the prize seeks to cultivate and promote books marked by vision, distinctive language, and depth of research and discernment about topics not otherwise adequately addressed—and that also deepen our understanding of the human condition and are of broad interest and appeal.”
Isabel Wilkerson, author of the award-winning The Warmth of Other Suns and Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent, was the recipient of the inaugural NYU/Axinn Foundation Prize, which was given in 2020. Mary Gabriel, author of Ninth Street Women and Madonna: A Rebel Life, among other works, was the recipient of the 2022 prize.
Elkins, a professor of history and African and African American Studies at Harvard and the Thomas Henry Carroll/Ford Foundation Professor at Harvard Business School, received the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction for Imperial Reckoning (Henry Holt, 2005), which was also selected as a “Book of the Year” by the Economist. Elkins, whose research for the book served as the basis for the historic Mau Mau reparations case in the High Court of London, is also a contributor to the New York Times Book Review, the Guardian, the Atlantic, the Washington Post, and the New Republic and has appeared on NPR’s “All Things Considered” and the BBC’s “The World,” among other television and radio programs.
Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire (Penguin Random House, 2022), Elkins’ most recent book, chronicles the British Empire’s pervasive use of violence in the 20th century, tracing how it was exported and institutionalized among its colonies. “Her history shows how the barbarity behind imperial pomp and civilizing mission statements was perfected in the long tail of empire after the first world war,” wrote the Guardian. “(S)he has added important dimension to our still partial understanding of the British Empire’s sadism and hypocrisy, joining the novelists and the dramatists who, as she says, have reminded the world ‘that alternative narratives lie buried beneath the rubble of power’,” wrote the New Yorker.
This year the judges chose Elkins and this representative work as “a masterful and passionate narrative history of Imperial Power and its disintegration across a global century of rival European nations and post-colonial freedom. Epic in scope, scholarly in its detailed study of decisive episodes of violence, Caroline Elkins’ magisterial history draws us into the drama of global history over the past two hundred years, a drama which her literary skills and close up attention to a remarkable range of personalities, strategies, incidents, legal and political reverberations place any thoughtful reader in a new and complex moral relationship to a phase of world history that has important implications for our own American present.”