Announcing the 2011
Orion Book Award Winner
Orion Book Award Winner
Winner:
Insectopedia
by Hugh Raffles (Pantheon Books)
About This Book
Audio Interview with Hugh Raffles
Finalists:
Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology
by David Abram (Pantheon Books)
About a Mountain
by John D’Agata (W. W. Norton)
The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival
by John Vaillant (Alfred A. Knopf)
Deep Blue Home: An Intimate Ecology of Our Wild Ocean
by Julia Whitty (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
The award will be presented at the annual Orion Book Award ceremony and reception on April 6, 2011, at The powerHouse Arena in Brooklyn.
2011 Selection Committee
Robin Kimmerer is a Distinguished Professor at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry. Her book Gathering Moss was awarded the 2005 John Burroughs Medal.
Verlyn Klinkenborg is a member of the editorial board of The New York Times. His books include Making Hay, The Rural Life, and, most recently, Timothy; Or, Notes of an Abject Reptile.
Richard Nash is an independent publishing entrepreneur, presently launching Red Lemonade, the first publishing community from his start-up Cursor. For most of the past decade, he ran Soft Skull Press.
Jennifer Sahn is editor of Orion.
Ginger Strand (chair) is the author of Inventing Niagara: Beauty, Power, and Lies, and Flight, a novel. She has published essays and fiction in many places, including Harper’s, The Believer, The Iowa Review and Orion, where she is a contributing editor.
The Orion Book Award is made possible through the generous support of Organic Valley.
About the Orion Book Award
The Orion Book Award is given annually to a book that addresses the human relationship with the natural world in a fresh, thought provoking, and engaging manner. Four additional books are named as finalists.
Books eligible for the Orion Book Award are judged against these criteria:
• That it deepens our connection to the natural world
• That it presents new ideas about our relationship with nature
• That it achieves excellence in writing
The Orion Book Award recognizes books published in North America during the previous calendar year. Nominations for the award are made by advisors, writers, editors, and contributing editors of Orion. Selection of the winning book and four finalists are made by a five-person selection committee, which changes annually. Nominations from authors or from publishers, editors, or agents of books that they have been involved with are not accepted.
More information about previous Orion Book Award winners and finalists is available here.
