Announcing the 2012
Orion Book Award Winner
Orion Book Award Winner
Winner
The View from Lazy Point
by Carl Safina (Henry Holt and Company)
Finalists
Fire Season
by Philip Connors (Ecco)
by Helon Habila (W. W. Norton & Co.)
by Karen Russell (Alfred A. Knopf)
by Sandra Steingraber (Da Capo Press)
2012 Selection Committee
Steve Curwood is Executive Producer and Host of the radio program Living on Earth; he is also the recipient of the 2003 Global Green Award for Media Design, the 2003 David A. Brower Award from the Sierra Club for excellence in environmental reporting and the 1992 New England Environmental Leadership Award from Tufts University for his work on promoting environmental awareness. He is president of the World Media Foundation, Inc. and a Lecturer in Environmental Science and Public Policy at Harvard University.
Elizabeth Kolbert has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1999. Her stories for the magazine have included political profiles, book reviews, Comment pieces, and extensive writing on climate change. Her three-part series on global warming, “The Climate of Man,” won the 2006 National Magazine Award for Public Interest, the 2005 American Association for the Advancement of Science Journalism Award, and the 2006 National Academies Communication Award. Her first book, The Prophet of Love: And Other Tales of Power and Deceit, was published in 2004. Her second book was Field Notes from a Catastrophe, (2006), on global warming.
Rob Spillman is Editor of Tin House Magazine—a literary magazine that has been honored in Best American Stories, Best American Essays, Best American Poetry, O. Henry Prize Stories, the Pushcart Prize Anthology and numerous other anthologies—and he is also the Executive Editor of Tin House Books. His writing has appeared in BookForum, the Boston Review, Connoisseur, Details, GQ, Nerve, the New York Times Book Review, Real Simple, Rolling Stone, Salon, Spin, Sports Illustrated, Vanity Fair, Vogue, and Worth, among other magazines, newspapers, essay collections, and online journals.
Cheryl Strayed is the author of three books: Wild, a memoir (Knopf), Tiny Beautiful Things, a selection of her “Dear Sugar” columns from TheRumpus.net (forthcoming from Vintage, July 2012), and Torch, a novel (Houghton Mifflin, 2006). Her writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post Magazine, Vogue, Allure, Self, The Missouri Review, Brain, Child, Creative Nonfiction, Water~Stone Review, The Sun, Orion, and elsewhere.
H. Emerson Blake has served as Editor-in-Chief of Orion and Executive Director of The Orion Society since 2005. Previously he was Editor-in-Chief of Milkweed Editions, a nonprofit book publisher. Work he has edited has been nominated for or won the Pushcart Prize, the PEN Literary Award, the John Oakes Award in Environmental Journalism, the John Burroughs Medal, the Minnesota Book Award, the Oregon Book Award, and has been selected for inclusion in Best American Essays and as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. He is a judge for a number of literary awards and has served as a panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts.
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.
