Amy Irvine’s Trespass: Living at the Edge of the Promised Land (North Point Press) is the winner of the 2008 Orion Book Award, which recognizes books that deepen our connection to the natural world, present new ideas about our relationship with nature, and achieve excellence in writing.

“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.

The Orion Book Award is made possible in part by a grant from the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation.