We’ve begun this year with a number of nice honors for books we published in the last. Seems that 2011 was a particularly nice year for HUP biographies. One of them, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst’s Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist, has been shortlisted for the 2011 Duff Cooper Prize, which celebrates the best in non-fiction writing. The winner will be announced at a party given at the French Embassy in London on Wednesday, February 29th. This welcome accolade joins many others for Douglas-Fairhurst’s unconventional look at Dickens, which was recognized as a favorite of 2011 by such publications as The Wall Street Journal, The Times Literary Supplement, and The Telegraph.
We’re also proud to see another biography, Ezra F. Vogel’s Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China, earning wide praise. Having already been named a highlight of 2011 by The Economist, Washington Post, and others, Vogel’s masterful look at China’s boldest strategist has also been named a Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award for biography. In what was an exceptional year for the category, Vogel’s book keeps great company among co-Finalists such as Manning Marable’s Malcolm X and John Lewis Gaddis’s take on George F. Kennan.
Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China has also been longlisted for the 2012 Lionel Gelber Prize, which celebrates the best non-fiction book on foreign affairs published in English. And joining Vogel on the Gelber longlist is Sean McMeekin’s The Russian Origins of the First World War, which boldly upends the conventional understanding of Russia’s part in the Great War. The Gelber list will be shortened in early February, and the winner of the $15,000 Prize will be announced on March 12th.
We’re also honored to note that Daniel Blatman’s The Death Marches: The Final Phase of Nazi Genocide was named Co-Winner of the Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research, for which 2011 was the inaugural year. The Book Prize Committee praised The Death Marches as “an important, path breaking new study on a well-known yet largely unstudied part of the Holocaust,” and described the book as “masterly, a veritable tour de force, and truly a pioneering study and an example of outstanding scholarship.”
And we’d also like to note the awarding of the American Historical Association’s 2011 George Louis Beer Prize to David Ciarlo, for Advertising Empire: Race and Visual Culture in Imperial Germany. The award, given in recognition of outstanding historical writing on any phase of European international history since 1895, is open to any scholar who is a U.S. citizen or permanent resident. Ciarlo recently discussed his innovative visual history of the German colonial worldview with the folks at New Books in History, where you can listen to the conversation.
On our website, you can scroll through other recent awards for HUP books, and we’ve also collected the Book of the Year citations given to over two dozen HUP works released in 2011. We’re continually honored to be working with such talented scholars, and we’re very proud to see their wonderful work recognized so widely.
