Eliza Griswold, a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, has won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction for Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).
The work, published in 2018, is a “classic American story, grippingly told, of an Appalachian family struggling to retain its middle-class status in the shadow of destruction wreaked by corporate oil fracking,” Columbia University said in announcing this year’s Pulitzer winners, which are awarded on the recommendation of the Pulitzer Prize Board.
Griswold is a contributing writer covering religion, politics, and the environment at the New Yorker, and her journalism has appeared in the New York Times Magazine and the Smithsonian, among other publications. In addition to Amity and Prosperity, Griswold has penned The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), a New York Times bestseller that was awarded the J. Anthony Lukas Prize; it explores where Christianity and Islam meet in Africa and Asia.
Her work also includes a collection of poems, Wideawake Field (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), with other verses appearing in Granta, the New Yorker, and the Paris Review. Her translations of Afghan women’s folk poetry, I Am the Beggar of the World (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), won the 2015 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. Her second book of poems, If Men, Then, will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2020.
More than 2,500 entries are submitted each year to the Pulitzer Prize competition, and 21 prizes are given. This year’s prizes will be awarded at a lunch on May 28 at Columbia’s Low Memorial Library.
Dan Fagin, director of the Carter Journalism Institute’s Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program, was also awarded the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction, winning in 2014 for Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation (Bantam Books).
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