Past Winners: The Orion Book Award

2010
Winner


Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing: Living in the Future, by Charles Bowden (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).

“Bowden’s writing is not only stunning,” said Ted Genoways, editor of The Virginia Quarterly Review and member of the 2010 Orion Book Award selection committee, “but the risks that he is willing to take are sometimes breathtaking. It’s journalism of a really compelling kind.”

Finalists
The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World, by Wade Davis (House of Anansi Press)
Rewilding the West: Restoration in a Prairie Landscape, by Richard Manning (University of California Press)
Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing: Stories, by Lydia Peelle (Harper Perennial)
The Barbaric Heart: Faith, Money, and the Crisis of Nature, Curtis White (PoliPointPress)

Selection Committee
Don Snow (author, currently working on book of personal essays titled The Cabin of No Fishing), Anthony Doerr (author of four books, most recently Memory Wall), Ted Genoways (editor of Virginia Quarterly Review), Karen Russell (author of St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves), and Harlan Clifford (at that time, executive editor of Orion).

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.”

Finalists
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)

Selection Committee
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.

2008
Winner


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

“The Zookeeper’s Wife is a groundbreaking work of nonfiction,” said selection committee member Mark Kurlansky, “in which the human relationship to nature is explored in an absolutely original way through looking at the Holocaust.” Kathleen Dean Moore, the committee’s chairperson, said: “A few years ago, ‘nature’ writers were asking themselves: How can a book be at the same time a work of art, an act of conscientious objection to the destruction of the world, and an affirmation of hope and human decency? The Zookeeper’s Wife answers this question.”

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
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)

2007
Winner



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

“In this stunningly rich work of literary nonfiction, Jay Griffiths traces her efforts to rediscover in the mind, in culture, and in the natural world the generative possibilities of the wild. The structure of Wild is brisk and innovative, the language often baroque and playful to the point of startling excess — in form as well as content, this is a celebration, exploration, and demonstration of wildness, broadly conceived. Brilliant, irrepressible, randy, and learned, this risk-taking book guides readers on a wild ride of the imagination. The world feels different — richer and stranger — after one reads these words.”  – Scott Slovic, 2007 Selection Committee Chair

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).

The Orion Book Award is made possible through the generous support of Orion donors, the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, and Organic Valley.