Manya Wilkinson won the £4,000 (about $5,175) Wingate Literary Prize, which honors "the best book, fiction or nonfiction, to translate the idea of Jewishness to the general reader," for Lublin. The award run in association with the Jewish Literary Foundation.
The judges said: "What a wonderful--and excruciating--process judging this prize was. We were and are so proud of our longlist and our shortlist, showcasing such a wide range of fiction, history, memoir and biography. Each of these books conveys 'the idea of Jewishness to the general reader,' as the prize rubric has it--at the same time engaging with a remarkably wide variety of material. Choosing one winner was not a simple process, and there was much impassioned debate; all of us judges absolutely stand behind each of these titles. But in the end only one book can triumph, and Manya Wilkinson's Lublin was the book that surprised us most, astonished us most, left the most lingering impression in all of our minds."