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The Orion Book Award

The Orion Book Award was founded in 2007 to recognize books that deepen our connection to the natural world, present new ideas about our relationship with nature, and achieve excellence in writing. The Orion Book Award recognizes books published in the previous calendar year. For more about the award click here.

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.

The 2010 Orion Book Award will be chosen by a panel of five judges who consider a select list of books, beginning in January 2010. That list is compiled throughout the year by Orion staff, contributing editors, and advisors. There is no formal process for nominating books for consideration, but we do ask readers to let us know of books they particularly liked. We do not accept nominations from publishers, editors, agents, or authors of books that they have been involved with.

Click here for information about the 2009 Orion Reader’s Choice Award.

2009
Winner
Trespass: Living at the Edge of the Promised Land, by Amy Irvine (North Point Press).

“Amy Irvine composes a staggering litany of trespasses great and small in Utah’s red rock country,” says selection committee chairperson Donna Seaman of Trespass. “As she braids together threads of Mormon history, family stories, and tales about her work for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance in her elegiac memoir of dissent, Irvine unveils the interconnectivity of life; the fact that everything matters: every cow and every coyote, every blade of invasive cheat grass, every human being, every dam, every hole drilled into the desert, every betrayal. For Irvine—passionate, imaginative, furious and visionary—language is a ladder out of the silencing cave of despair.”

The author will be presented with a prize of $3,000 at a celebration on April 15 at Cynthia-Reeves gallery, 535 West 24th Street, 2nd Floor, New York, New York, from 5:30-8:00 p.m. The event is open to the public.

Finalists
Trespass, by Amy Irvine (North Point Press)
The Wild Places, by Robert Macfarlane (Penguin Books)
The Bridge at the Edge of the World, by James Gustave Speth (Yale)
Inventing Niagara, by Ginger Strand (Simon & Schuster)
Finding Beauty in a Broken World, by Terry Tempest Williams (Pantheon Books)

Nominees for the 2009 Orion Book Award
Are listed here.

Selection Committee
Judges for the 2009 award (for books published in 2008) include Roger D. Hodge (editor, Harper’s Magazine); Scott Russell Sanders (Staying Put, Writing from the Center); Donna Seaman (Booklist, Chicago Public Radio); Susan Straight (Highwire Moon, A Million Nightingales); and Orion Editor-in-Chief H. Emerson Blake.

We thank the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation for their generous support of the Orion Book Award.

2008
Winner
The Zookeeper’s Wife: A War Story, by Diane Ackerman (W. W. Norton)

Finalists
Strange as This Weather Has Been: A Novel, by Ann Pancake (Counterpoint)
The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring, by Richard Preston (Random House)
Sky Time in Gray’s River: Living for Keeps in a Forgotten Place, by Robert Michael Pyle (Houghton Mifflin)
The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman (St. Martin’s Press/Thomas Dunne Books)

Selection committee
Selection of the finalists and the winning book were made by a five-person selection committee comprised of Linda Hogan (Dwellings; Solar Storms); Mark Kurlansky (Cod; Salt); Kathleen Dean Moore (The Pine Island Paradox; Holdfast); David Rothenberg (Always the Mountains; Why Birds Sing); and Jennifer Sahn (editor of Orion)

For more information about the 2008 award click HERE.

2007
Winner
Wild: An Elemental Journey, by Jay Griffiths (Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin)

Finalists
The Lives of Rocks: Stories, by Rick Bass (Houghton Mifflin)
Inferno, by Charles Bowden, photographs by Michael P. Berman (University of Texas Press)
Returning to Earth, by Jim Harrison (Grove Press)
The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, by Michael Pollan (The Penguin Press).

Selection committee
Alison Hawthorne Deming (Science and Other Poems); David G. Campbell (The Crystal Desert); Pam Houston (Sighthound); Scott Slovic (founding president of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment); and H. Emerson Blake (editor-in-chief of Orion).

For more information about the 2007 award click HERE.