The American Library Association named the winners of the 2021 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction. Each winning author receives $5,000. All the finalists will be honored during a celebratory event at ALA's 2021 Annual Conference in June. This year's Carnegie Medal winners are:
Fiction: Deacon King Kong by James McBride (Riverhead). The judges commented: "Portraying a vibrant, multicultural 1969 Brooklyn neighborhood... McBride creates tragedies, funny moments, major plot twists and cultural and generational clashes as characters develop emotionally while navigating a world that's changing for better and for worse."
Nonfiction: Fathoms: The World in the Whale by Rebecca Giggs (S&S). The judges praised the winning author's "deeply delving and lyrically precise investigation. With fresh perceptions and cascades of facts, Giggs considers our ancient and persistent whale wonderment, high-tech whale hunting, global warming, mass extinction, and pollution, including the oceanic plastic plague, urging us to save the whales, the oceans, and ourselves."
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Judith Herrin won the £5,000 (about $6,840) Pol Roger Duff Cooper Prize for historical work for Ravenna: Capital of Empire, Crucible of Europe, published here by Princeton University Press. The prize will be presented informally in 2021, as it was last year, in view of the continuing Covid-19 restrictions.
Chair of the jury Artemis Cooper said: "The early medieval mosaics of Ravenna still dazzle us today; but while little of its early history remains, the Byzantine scholar Judith Herrin has consulted sources from all over Europe to piece it together. In this beautifully written and gorgeously illustrated book, she reveals a city that was a melting-pot of Greek, Latin, Christian and Barbarian cultures, and a vital pivot between the rival worlds of Rome and Constantinople."