The Robert B. Silvers Foundation announced the winners of the third annual Silvers-Dudley Prizes, which recognize “outstanding achievement in literary criticism, arts writing, and journalism.”
The Silvers-Dudley Prizes are named after Silvers, the longtime editor of the New York Review of Books, and his partner, Grace, Countess of Dudley. Judging this year’s awards were author Charles McGrath, poet Diane Mehta, and writer Andrew Durbin.
The winners of the Robert B. Silvers Prizes for Literary Criticism were Louis Menand, the essayist and author of books including The Metaphysical Club and The Free World, and critic Christopher Tayler.
The Grace Dudley Prizes for Arts Writing went to Judith Thurman, the critic whose books include Cleopatra’s Nose: 39 Varieties of Desire and A Left-Handed Woman: Essays, and New Yorker theater critic Helen Shaw.
The winners of the Robert B. Silvers Prizes for Journalism were reporters Gary Younge, author of Another Day in the Death of America: A Chronicle of Ten Short Lives, and William Finnegan, author of Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life.
Daniel Mendelsohn, the director of the Robert B. Silvers Foundation, said in a statement, “[T]his year in particular it is especially meaningful to be able to recognize and to reward these six brilliant writers’ magnificent talent for incisive critical thinking and a richly nuanced engagement with culture, literature, history, and politics—qualities that are too often absent from much popular discourse.”
The Silvers-Dudley Prizes were established in 2021. Previous winners include Merve Emre, Vinson Cunningham, Parul Sehgal, and Becca Rothfeld.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
