Timothy Snyder, Parul Sehgal win Silvers-Dudley Prizes

By The Associated Press on January 4, 2023.

NEW YORK (AP) – Historian Timothy Snyder and literary critic Parul Sehgal are among the winners of the second annual Silvers-Dudley Prizes, named in part for the late editor of The New York Review of Books, Robert Silvers.

The Robert B. Silvers Foundation announced six awards Wednesday, in three categories, with prize money totaling $135,000.

Snyder, who specializes in European history and authoritarian governments, received a $30,000 journalism prize given for “reporting, long-form political analysis, or commentary.” A second journalism award, worth $15,000, went to investigative reporter and feature writer Caitlin Dickerson of the Atlantic.

Sehgal, a staff writer for The New Yorker and former New York Times book critic, received $30,000 for “long-form literary criticism and the intellectual and cultural essay.” Ryan Ruby, whose essays have run in The New York Times and Harper’s among other publications, was given $15,000.

Two Silvers-Dudley prizes were given for arts writing: A $30,000 honor for T. J. Clark, an art historian and professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, and $15,000 for Tausif Noor, an art critic and a Ph.D candidate at Berkeley in art history.

The awards are named for Silvers and his late partner Lady Grace Dudley.

“The Silvers Foundation is delighted once again to award these prizes to outstanding practitioners of genres too long under-recognized in the economy of literary prize-giving, the genres which Bob so assiduously nurtured at the New York Review,” Daniel Mendelsohn, chair of the Silvers Foundation and editor-at-large of The New York Review of Books, said in a statement.

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