Since its establishment in 1972, the Whiting Foundation has been dispensing awards, grants, and all manner of support for both individual writers and arts institutions. Today, the literary arts organization has two big things to celebrate: the announcement of its annual list of Whiting Creative Nonfiction grantees, and the appointment of a new executive director, Constantia Constantinou.
A globally-minded leader renowned for “her pioneering work in technology, digitization, and culture heritage preservation,” Constantinou’s previously held academic leadership roles at the State University of New York and the University of Pennsylvania. “Recognizing that irreplaceable cultural heritage is being lost around the world, I am committed to joining with our partners to save the treasures of human civilization from threats both man-made and natural,” she said of Whiting’s future, in an enthusiastic acceptance statement.
And speaking of treasures! The ten recipients of the Nonfiction grant—now in its ninth year—will each receive $40,000 for their books in progress. Created nine years ago “to foster original, ambitious projects” of the highest possible standard, previous grant recipients include Rachel Aviv, Sarah Broom, and Ilyon Woo.
This year’s winners represent a highly diverse cross-section of subjects and styles. Recognized projects involve investigative reportage, cultural history, biography, and literary criticism. And grantees hail from all over the world, from Mexico City to Detroit.
Here are the ten grantees: Leah Broad, James Duesterberg, Arun Kundani, Sarah Esther Maslin, Hettie O’Brien, Emily Ogden, Nadim Roberts, Heather Ann Thompson, Ronald Williams II and Hannah Zeavin. Read on for a glimpse of their winning books. (Though we note, all titles are provisional.)
Leah Broad
This Woman’s War: Women and Music in World War II (UK’s Faber & Faber) is a cultural history of World War II told through the unsung lives of women musicians who entertained the troops, fought for their country in secret, and kept hope alive on the home front. Crossing Britain, Europe, Russia, and the United States, this history shows how women musicians like Alma Rosé and Elly Ney shaped wartime culture.
The judges praised this kaleidoscopic book for its “revelatory angle,” its fresh, clear writing, and a seamlessly integrated research narrative.
James Duesterberg
Final Fantasy: A Secret History of the Present (Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Penguin Press) is a “narrative history of the postwar political imagination.” Weaving together the emergence of information theory in computing and public policy, structuralism in philosophy, and avant-gardism in culture, it tracks the breakdown of the liberal-democratic consensus and the rise, in its place, of the dream of an automatically functioning society that bypasses any need for individual decision-making, political debate, or collective action. Final Fantasy shows how the utopian logic of art can transform into a dystopian engine of social collapse.
The judges praised this “rich and textured examination” of our culture’s biggest paradoxes for its energy and assurance.
Arun Kundnani
I Rise in Fire: H. Rap Brown, Jamil Al-Amin, and the Long Revolution (Doubleday) is a biography of Jamil Al-Amin, formerly known as H. Rap Brown, a civil rights activist who served as chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and as the Black Panthers’ Minister of Justice, and who is currently incarcerated for life.
Judges admired the scope of this highly researched project, which “reshapes our understanding of the War on Drugs, the War on Terror, and what happened to the radicalism of the 1960s.” In gripping, politically clear prose, Kundnani “stitches new and profound connections between the backlash against the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and anti-Muslim hysteria after 9/11.”
Sarah Esther Maslin
Over the course of three days in December 1981, Salvadoran soldiers trained and armed by the United States massacred more than 1,000 civilians in El Mozote, a village in El Salvador, and surrounding rural hamlets. Nothing Stays Buried: Trauma, Truth, and One Town’s Fight for Justice in the Aftermath of a Massacre (Spiegel & Grau) is a deeply reported narrative of the long aftermath of this horror, tracings the lives of the survivors who decided to return and draws a critical portrait of how American foreign policy continues to affect other countries and their citizens long after attention shifts elsewhere.
This powerful, empathic work of reportage honors the wrenching story of a massacre in a remote village by showing how it is also a story of power, nations, foreign policy, and cycles of trauma. Judges praised Maslin’s keen, sensitive observations, and moral conviction.
Hettie O’Brien
Diminishing Returns (Weidenfeld & Nicolson and Grand Central) “takes a close look at what happens when your elderly parents’ retirement home, the nursery where you drop your children, or the company that pipes water into your kitchen is taken over by an increasingly intricate and deregulated industry.” This economic analysis looks at the outsize global influence of private equity firms.
The judges commented: “In swift-moving, lucid prose, Hettie O’Brien makes exceedingly complex financial arrangements not just intelligible, but riveting…Diminishing Returns will be an animated and momentous contribution to the ongoing debate about what we can rightly expect from government.”
Emily Ogden
Frailties: How Poe Helps Us Live with Ourselves (Viking Penguin) is an intimate literary biography of Edgar Allan Poe related in essays. Tracing the mark his life and work left on notable admirers, including Charles Baudelaire, Marie Bonaparte, and Julio Cortázar, Frailties also contemplates how Poe helps us navigate the darkness we all share.
Judges admired “this bravura hybrid of biography, memoir, and philosophy” for its humor and vivid characterization. “Emily Ogden is so fully in control of her material and form that she is able to work as a great novelist does, lighting up points of contact for the reader, both intellectual and emotional.”
Nadim Roberts
The Highway (Signal/McClelland & Stewart and Spiegel & Grau) relates a gripping history. In 1972, three Inuit boys ran away from a residential school in the Canadian Arctic, vanishing into the tundra. Weeks later, only one of the boys reappeared in his hometown, near death after a 150-kilometer journey through the wilderness. Half a century later, the story of the three boys resurfaced. The Highway tells the tale of these three boys and their families, the legacy of Arctic colonization, and how a road to the end of the continent continues to affect their communities today.
The judges commented: “The Highway is rendered with the delicate light and shadow only achieved through sustained, up-close reporting…This is a rare mix of propulsive narrative and searching reflection on cultural and national identity.”
Heather Ann Thompson
Fear and Fury: Bernhard Goetz and the Rebirth of White Vigilantism in America (Pantheon Books) is a reported history examining one of the most notorious events of the Reagan Era. The book takes us to a New York City subway car in 1984, when a white loner gunned down four unarmed Black teenagers in one brutal act of vigilantism. With stunning speed, an unapologetic villain would become a celebrity, his four victims would become “thugs” and “animals,” and the nation’s future would never be the same.
Judges admired this “masterful, fine-tuned work” by a world-class historian, and predict this book “will be a landmark reframing of the modern resurgence of white vigilante violence.”
Ronald Williams II
Black Embassy: TransAfrica and the Struggle for Foreign Policy Justice (University of North Carolina Press) is an institutional history of the African American foreign advocacy organization TransAfrica, best known for its pivotal role in galvanizing American anti-apartheid activism in the 1980s. Drawing on extensive archival research and interviews, the book sets out to cover virtually every development in American foreign policy vis-à-vis Africa and the Caribbean since World War II. More broadly, it chronicles the efforts of African Americans to wield influence in US foreign relations.
The judges commented: “Ronald Williams II has crafted a definitive and surprisingly intimate guide through the lifespan of a powerful political organization.” They also noted the “confident, lively prose.”
Hannah Zeavin
All Freud’s Children: A Story of Inheritance (Penguin Press and Fern Press) is a group biography of noteworthy psychoanalysts and their children—beginning with Sigmund and Anna Freud—that traces some of the most significant contributions of psychoanalysis back to their intimate origins. Framed by personal reflections from the author’s own experience of being raised by analysts, it examines how the home lives of these thinkers shaped the theories that made them famous.
According to judges, “All Freud’s Children reveals how axiomatic theories are created from subjective experience and illuminates the humanity of the people who developed them.” This book examines what’s at stake when the particular is made to stand for the universal.
For more on the winning writers and their projects, go here.
Congratulations to the grantees!
