The American Library Association honored Valeria Luiselli and Adam Higginbotham with its annual Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction.
Luiselli won the fiction award for Lost Children Archive, her immigration-themed novel about two parents who embark on a road trip from New York to Arizona with their children. The book was a finalist for the 2019 Kirkus Prize for Fiction, and is on the shortlist for this year’s National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction.
“Intense and timely, Valeria Luiselli’s novel tracks husband-and-wife audio documentarians as they travel cross-country with their two children and deep into the painful history of the Apache people and the present immigration crisis on the Southwest border, while freshly exploring themes of conquest and remembrance, and powerfully conveying the beauty of the haunted landscape,” the ALA said.
Higginbotham took home the nonfiction prize for Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster.
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Adam Higginbotham has created a thoroughly researched, fast-paced, engrossing, and revelatory account of what led up to and what followed the explosion of Reactor Four at the Chernobyl nuclear-power plant on April 26, 1986, focusing on the people involved as they faced shocking circumstances that are having complex and significant global consequences,” the ALA said.
Luiselli and Higginbotham will each receive a $5,000 cash prize with the awards, which will be presented to them at the ALA annual conference in Chicago in June.
Michael Schaub is an Austin, Texas–based journalist and regular contributor to NPR.
