The 2016 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant Deborah Baker Sarah M. Broom Timothy N. Golden Joshua Roebke Sarah Elizabeth Ruden John Jeremiah Sullivan
The Whiting Foundation recognizes that works of compelling, deeply researched nonfiction are essential to our culture, but come into being at great cost to writers in time and resources. The Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant of $35,000 is intended to encourage original and ambitious projects by giving its grantees the additional means to do exacting research and devote time to composition.
The Recipients of the Inaugural
Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant
Deborah Baker
The Last Englishman: Love,War and the End of Empire Forthcoming from Graywolf Press
“By the end of his first year as viceroy a face-to-face meeting with Gandhi had become pressing. First, however, he had to parse those devilish questions of protocol by which he set great store. Should Gandhi be allowed to sign the Viceroy’s guest book? Could his office insist upon decent dress? Clearly Gandhi could not be received in the circular marble chamber of the throne room. The throne room of Buckingham Palace was modest by comparison with that of the Viceroy’s, the largest in the world.… Gandhi of course would have to make the first move. A formal application for an interview would be required. And Linlithgow wouldn’t reply right off. He was absolutely not going to make it easy for him.”
The Jury: “An immersive book about a cast of characters who stood at the edge of history, written by a clever excavator, elegant wordsmith, and structural craftsman who is adept across cultures. Through their lives and loves, Baker illuminates the world on the cusp of war, chaos, and vast social change. Baker’s novelistic pages have an ease and elegance that make them a pleasure to read. The prodigious volume of her research is evident, but the text wears it lightly.”
The narrative of The Last Englishman pivots between London and Calcutta, from the 1930s to the war and Independence, as English and Indian writers, artists, and adventurers struggled to define their political allegiances and most deeply held beliefs. At the center of these interlocking circles are the elder brothers of W.H. Auden and Stephen Spender, that era’s best-known English poets, and the woman they both loved. Her choice would determine where their wartime loyalties would lie: with England and its unraveling Empire, or an independent India. Deborah Baker’s books include Making a Farm: The Life of Robert Bly; In Extremis: The Life of Laura Riding; A Blue Hand: The Beats in India; and The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism. In Extremis was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography in 1994. The Convert was a finalist for the 2011 National Book Award in Non-Fiction. She was a Guggenheim Fellow and a 2008-2009 Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis C. Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars at The New York Public Library. Baker divides her time between Brooklyn and Goa.
Sarah M. Broom
The Yellow House Forthcoming from Grove Press
“Shame is a slow creeping. The most powerful things are quietest, if you think about it. Like water. I cannot pinpoint the precise moment I came to understand that no one was ever to come inside the Yellow House. My mother began saying you know this house not all that comfortable for other people and that line seemed, after a time, unending, a verbal tic so at home with us that she need not ever complete the sentence. You know this house...�
The Jury: “From a singular writer, a crucial memoir of life on the margins — one that, through ruthless observation and deepest intelligence, might help reintegrate what happens in those margins into the central narratives of American life. Alternating gracefully between immediacy and critical distance, she leaves us with deep insight not just into her own family, her own community, but into governance, justice, and inequality in the round. Timeless in its telling, The Yellow House could become a modern classic.”
The Yellow House is part portrait of a place — New Orleans — and part autobiography of a woman who belongs to it, the youngest in a family of twelve. It is the story of a house in New Orleans East that was demolished by the city in the wake of Hurricane Katrina without a single family member there to witness it, and of an ignored suburb on the margins of the city’s center where tourists sleep the night. Sarah M. Broom’s work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The Oxford American and O, The Oprah Magazine, among others. A native New Orleanian, she received her Masters in Journalism from the University of California, Berkeley in 2004, and was lead writer for Mayor Ray Nagin of New Orleans. She has been awarded fellowships at Djerassi Resident Artists Program and The MacDowell Colony. The Yellow House will be her first book. She lives in Woodstock, New York.
Timothy N. Golden
Nowhere Land: America and Its Enemies at Guantánamo Forthcoming from The Penguin Press
“The cellblocks were crude, slapdash and — even at a cost of $30 million — not well made. Pentagon officials who tried to decipher the cryptic instructions of their boss thought Rumsfeld wanted something he wouldn’t mind abandoning after a few years, once the prisoners had all been wrung out, prosecuted or sent home.”
The Jury: “Urgent, revelatory, brave investigative reporting from someone with unmatched sources in his subject area. Nowhere Land is a forensic, nuanced and devastating account of a hidden chapter in American history, one whose consequences still reverberate around the world. Like the best narrative non-fiction it reads like a novel, in this case a thriller with appalling, hard-to-credit twists and turns. We will look back at this period of history, when people could disappear into a system without trial, justice or end, and wonder how it happened and who made it possible. Golden has devoted himself to pinning down a story that many would prefer never be told, and has sacrificed much to write what must be written. A monumental achievement.”
Nowhere Land is a groundbreaking narrative history of the United States detention camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Based on hundreds of interviews and previously secret documents, the book shows in intimate, new detail how the military’s experiment in the strategic interrogation of terror suspects ensnared captives and captors alike, and gave way to one of the most costly US intelligence failures of the last century. Timothy Golden’s journalism honors include two shared Pulitzer Prizes for International Reporting and National Reporting. Previously a senior writer at The New York Times, in 2014 he was a founding managing editor of The Marshall Project. His reporting has also been recognized by the Overseas Press Club, the Inter-American Press Association and the Taylor Award for Fairness in Newspapers, among others. He was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, a Schwartz Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, and was awarded a MacArthur Residency at Yaddo. He is a Public Policy Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. He lives in New York.
Joshua Roebke
The Invisible World: The Story of Physics in the 20th Century Forthcoming from Farrar, Straus & Giroux
“It is almost impossible now to imagine the fear and disbelief that Röntgen must have experienced when he waved his hand in front of the fluorescent screen and saw his skeletal hand waving back in the dark. That night, he was understandably late for his dinner. His wife Bertha, whose mother-in-law had taught her to prepare Röntgen’s favorite Dutch meals, sent for him several times from their large apartment above the ground-floor lab. He did not reply.”
The Jury: “A vivid, necessary, engaging history of physics that illuminates scientific ideas through biography, history, politics and culture. Roebke’s pages are striking and self-assured, giving every indication that he will fill the large ambition he has set for himself. This work of exemplary clarity and storytelling welcomes him to the forefront of our best science writers.”
The Invisible World is the first book to narrate the social and cultural history of particle physics in the 20th century, to describe the invisible objects and forces that have shaped our world, and to chronicle the lives of the people who revealed the unseen. It is the story of the small group of physicists whose discoveries changed the courses of nations and how these men and women were changed by what they did. Joshua Roebke teaches writing at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is also a research associate at the Institute for Historical Studies. He studied Spanish literature and nuclear physics at Michigan State University, and he received an M.Sc in theoretical physics from McGill University in Montreal. He was a magazine editor in New York and a Visiting Scholar in the history of science at UC, Berkeley. His work has also been featured in The Best American Science and Nature Writing. He lives in Austin, Texas.
Sarah Elizabeth Ruden
The Confessions of Augustine: A New Translation Forthcoming from the Modern Library
“Everything most enticing to Augustine’s intellect is stacked on the altar, less as a combustible sacrifice than as a bundle of fireworks: the way the mind works, the very memory he relies on to write this very autobiography; time, that powerful and mysterious entity seemingly both inside and outside himself; and reading and interpreting, those psychologically fascinating, ultra-prestigious, defining acts of a Roman gentleman.”
The Jury: “As the young people say: if you only read one scrupulously accurate and passionately literate new translation of St. Augustine’s Confessions, read this one. A poet, historian and political thinker, Ruden can render faith and feeling through language and metaphor. Scholarly rigor is rarely matched to language this delightful. A bad-ass independent scholar, she’s blowing the dust off of a venerable religious text and bringing us Augustine as he was in his own time, and this vigor makes a sixteen hundred-year-old book feel entirely contemporary. As well as translating a work of devotion, she seems to have enacted one.” This translation aims to be what the original work was for its readers: the witty, vivid story of a great mind that changed the world. Augustine applied the flashy but intricate, sophisticated but popular rhetorical style of his time to telling the story of his early life and later thought; he blended in freewheeling allegorical and poetic treatment of scripture, which he knew mainly from poor Latin translations of Greek and Hebrew. The result is a gorgeous literary knot. In the style itself is the substance of the hard choices Augustine made in his life. Sentence by sentence, his vocabulary, the rhetorical devices he adopts, and the balance of his phrases show the dilemmas that shaped his thinking and, through this, our own world. Sarah Elizabeth Ruden has authored multiple books of Greek and Latin translation, as well as related works; her book The Face of Water: A Translator on Beauty and Meaning in the Bible will be published by Knopf/Pantheon in 2017. Her prose has appeared in The American Scholar, The Wall Street Journal and Books & Culture. She is the author of the poetry collection Other Places (William Waterman Publications, 1995) and her poems have appeared in the National Review, Commonweal, Agenda and other journals. She is the recipient of a 2010–2011 Guggenheim Fellowship. Ruden lives in Connecticut and is a visiting researcher at Brown University.
John Jeremiah Sullivan
The Prime Minister of Paradise:
Christian Gottlieb Priber and the Search for a Lost American Enlightenment Forthcoming from Random House
“The bodies of the black and Indian women in the city were for sale. Beyond their enslavement, that is, they sold themselves or were sexually trafficked. Not all, of course, perhaps not even most, but very many. It was partly the obvious—extreme poverty and the economy of racial brutality—and partly a transplantation of urban English culture. Read London diaries from around this time—that of a young William Byrd, for instance—he could hardly get across the city without hiring at least two prostitutes. The German had not been with a woman in months, and had been on a ship for two of those. And was a passionate man. And rumored (or one should say, believed) to possess ideas of sexual morality that bordered on libertinage. He was noticing. We mention it. Apart from that, his reactions must be wondered at. They were evolving. We know they were different than the cycle of lust-and-disgust that characterized the town’s nightlife. He had come to this place in order, conscious or not, to participate in precisely this chaos and the fertilities it produced or made room for, a new kind of space that existed, he believed, under ambiguous governance.”
The Jury: “Original, obsessive, impressive, immersive — The Prime Minister of Paradise shows us how our country became itself. Sullivan brings years of developing his craft as a reporter to weave a compelling whole even when the documentary evidence is fragmentary; he is a thrilling writer, every page a delight of fact and style. In prose that is distinct, intelligent and contagiously joyful, Sullivan is making a significant and generative contribution to both American social history and global intellectual history.”
The Prime Minister of Paradise will tell, for the first time in a comprehensive way, the story of the lost utopian Christian Gottlieb Priber, one of the most fascinating and least understood figures of early American history. In the 1730s, he left his home in Germany and sailed to South Carolina, where he lived among the Cherokee Indians, working to establish a multiracial enlightenment city on the frontier. The English spent six years trying to capture him, and when they succeeded, threw him into an island prison off the coast of Georgia. He died there, and the manuscript of his book—an American utopian manifesto written a full generation before the Declaration of Independence—perished with him. Or so the encyclopedias say. This book will show that neither author nor text disappeared as thoroughly as has been assumed. John Jeremiah Sullivan is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine and southern editor of The Paris Review. Sullivan was born in Louisville, Kentucky. He is the author of Blood Horses: Notes of a Sportswriter’s Son (Picador, 2004) and Pulphead: Essays (FSG, 2011). Sullivan is the recipient of two National Magazine Awards, a 2004 Whiting Award, a 2011 Pushcart Prize, and a 2015 Windham-Campbell Literature Prize. He lives in North Carolina.
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