I am extremely pleased and proud to announce that my longtime mentor and dearest friend Laura Claridge has won the 2006 Lukas Prize jointly awarded by Harvard and Columbia Universities. Laura is the author of several scholarly books, as well as highly critically acclaimed biographies of Tamara De Lempicka and Norman Rockwell. Here is the announcement by Lawrence Van Gelder in the New York Times:
Laura Claridge’s ‘Emily Post and the Rise of Practical Feminism,’ to be published by Random House, has won the $30,000 J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award in the 2006 J. Anthony Lukas Prize Project Awards for exceptional nonfiction. Announced yesterday by the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and the Nieman Foundation, the accolades included the $10,000 Mark Lynton History Prize to Megan Marshall for ‘The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism’ (Houghton Mifflin) and the $10,000 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize to Nate Blakeslee for ‘Tulia: Race, Cocaine and Corruption in a Small Texas Town’ (Public Affairs Press). Mr. Lukas, a journalist and author who won two Pulitzer Prizes, died in 1997. The awards ceremony will be held on May 9 at Harvard University.
More about the Lukas Prize here. Congratulations, Laura, from all your fans here at 3QD! And I’ll be at Harvard on May 9th, for sure.